Greetings to All.
I write this post with a sadness in my heart. The more I think about the incident regarding Jim Cornette and his “joke” on this week’s episode of Powerrr, and after reading what Cornette had to say in his podcast, I can’t help but feel like the NWA is handling this situation in a somewhat deceitful manner. This is so disappointing for me because Powerrr had made me fall in love with professional wrestling. That feels tainted now.
As Jim Cornette was the one who uttered the controversial remark, he drew the initial focus of people’s displeasure. This was not a live event though. If it had been, then Cornette would be 100% responsible. This is a show that was taped almost two months ago. The NWA bears a large amount of the responsibility for the incident. Right from the start, the NWA framed the issue around Cornette. Let’s look at NWA Vice President David Lagana’s first tweet in response to the line causing offense.
Notice how Lagana immediately puts the incident on Cornette by saying “one of our talents made comments”. Again, this is a pre-taped show. According to Cornette, the line was heard by a variety of people through Cornette’s headset. The episode then was edited by Lagana himself who left the line in. Why wasn’t this tweet phrased along the lines of “We allowed an episode to air containing an offensive line.” Jim is playing a character on a show. Even if he’s choosing his lines, he’s still doing so trying to fit a character. It was on the NWA to catch the line and realize it could be problematic. They did not.
Then came Jim Cornette’s resignation. At this point, Cornette had not even had the opportunity to give his side of things. He did not even get to announce his own resignation. The NWA did that for him.
Everything about this announcement made it seem like this was a situation where an employee was given an opportunity to bow out gracefully or be publicly fired. Depicting it that way also shifts people’s attention to Cornette and his responsibility and away from the NWA. In many of the conversations I’ve seen regarding the resignation, people have said that Cornette was fired. That isn’t the case though. Cornette quit. He quit precisely because the NWA was not going to take any accountability for what took place.
Once outrage broke out over the line, NWA was going to have to do damage control. It seems the route they chose to go was to sacrifice Cornette to save their image. This may be a shrewd business move, but that doesn’t change the bitter taste left in my mouth by all of this. The NWA should have taken more responsibility for this and worked with Cornette to handle public reaction. Instead they lost a great announcer and someone who many fans felt was the only link between the old NWA and its current iteration. A sad situation all around and one that I do not know if the NWA will ever answer for.
Until We Meet Again,
Bryan Anthony
Wrestling 4 All 