TNA Impact Wrestling's "Executive Consultant" Jeff Jarrett recently spoke with RealSports about his past with WWE and WCW and the future of former TNA guys in WWE.
Jeff Jarrett is one of those guys who worked on both sides of the Monday Night Wars, so he has a unique perspective on how to compare WWE and WCW in the 90s and how one came out on top.
"Oil and water, if you want to compare the two. Vince McMahon, he's third generation, and his enormous empire, he ran it much like the territories. The buck stopped with him, he made the decisions, that's how a company should be run. Feast or famine, right or wrong, the WWE is driven off his decision making and always has been. WCW was a corporate world. Eric Bischoff, I have a lot of respect for the guy, because he not only survived, but he thrived in a corporate environment that was so difficult to succeed in. Was he the only decision maker? Not at all. It's a corporate entity, and a publicly traded company, so it's really not a knock on Turner and Time Warner and that organization, but that's the reality. An entertainment property, specifically a wrestling property, you have to have a decision maker. You have to have somebody who sits on top, that is guiding the ship, that makes the decisions. They were polar opposites, and in the end, the WCW money got them in first place for a while, with Eric's leadership and the hot talent, but in the end, Vince destroyed them."
Jarrett famously lost the Intercontinental Title to Chyna on his way out of WWE. The "Intergender Question" is an controversial one in today's wrestling community. Jarrett thinks that there's a time and a place for 'man-on-woman' action in the ring.
"Obviously in that time (Attitude Era), it was the right time. I think as a constant, it doesn't work, and it hasn't worked. That's been proven over history. But in the right time, in the right circumstance, with the right talent, and in that era, Chyna was one of those characters. She was one of the real personalities that defined the Attitude Era. Stone Cold, Rock, DX – when you think of DX, I immediately think of Road Dogg, his persona just oozed that attitude, and then you look at Chyna. She was the ninth wonder of the world, and everything that went with that. The timing and the situations that we were put together, eighteen years later we're still talking about it, so something was done right."
A lot of former TNA wrestlers have jumped ship to WWE and are making quite an impact (no pun intended). Jarrett feels like a proud papa.
"I couldn't be more happy for those guys. I saw AJ (Styles) in Nashville a couple of weeks ago. It was great to see him. We've stayed in contact, obviously through the New Japan relationship I got to see AJ quite a bit. Proud is a word, happy is a word. Going back to AJ debuting at the Royal Rumble, and the reaction he got, it put a huge smile on me and Karen's face, because AJ and his family are a huge part of my professional life, and personal life to a certain degree, from 2002 on. He was a young kid, go back and look at the pictures from North Georgia, that had a – pardon the pun – phenomenal ability in the ring, very athletic, and the matches that we had that are some of the best I ever had, give him the credit. AJ, Bobby (Roode), Samoa Joe, Eric Young's coming in – it's very obvious that I had nothing to do with their departure, and of course from a business point of view it's unfortunate, but also just to follow that up from a business point of view, it's one of the things that energizes me most about 2017 and beyond, is who is that next AJ Styles, who is that next Bobby Roode and Samoa Joe. They're out there – they're in this country actually – so that's one of the things that really excites me about the future of Impact and Global Force."
You can read the entire interview at this link.
