Wrestling legend Jim Cornette has responded to comments made by former WWE Superstar Nick Dinsmore that he smashed windows with a bat after a match between John Cena and Randy Orton in OVW went two minutes and seventeen seconds over time.
During an appearance on Talk is Jericho, Dinsmore, better known as Eugene in WWE, was asked if he had ever seen Cornette ‘freak out’ while he was working in OVW, which was WWE’s developmental promotion at the time. Eugene brought up a time when he witnessed Cornette beating windows with a baseball bat after Cena and Orton went over their allotted time limit.
“Cornette’s like, ‘Goddamn 2 minutes 17 seconds!’ Gets his baseball bat and starts beating the windows in the building down from us but it’s an old building. Hitting his car. Randy was gone. He just left when he came back. Every now and then it came out.”
Now, speaking on his Drive Thru podcast, Cornette has revealed that he doesn’t recall the specific incident, but admitted that it wouldn’t have been the only time.
“I wouldn’t have remembered it was actually Cena and Orton specifically, but, well that wasn’t the only time. At the old Davis Arena in Jeffersonville, we were the last tenants and it’s since been demolished[…]It had broken windows anyway and this old red brick and we were the only tenants in this whole complex, so I’d go out and throw some chairs through the f*****g windows or goddamn beat on some s**t.”
He went on to explain that going over time in a match, even if it was only two minutes, could lead to hours of extra work to get the show ready for television.
“What I was going to have to do was sit down and figure out a way to cut two minutes and seventeen seconds out of the VTRs, and the other stuff that we were gonna place in the programme afterwards, that had been carefully timed down to the second with verbal in and out cues so that we could drop them in the holes that Danny had left.
“We were probably gonna have to drop at least one minute, two of our commercial spots that were 30 seconds each, to make up that time and then gonna have to make another edit which laid another segment onto that Super VHS tape earlier than what it was so that we kept it on the master and then dub it over to a beta tape on our beta recorder to make the TV station think that we actually had professional equipment when we handed them a f****g tape.”
“So, just them not being able to hit their time cues caused us hours of extra work which is why the cardinal sin in OVW was ‘I don’t care what you f*****g do, even if you f**k up, don’t go over time’”.
Cornette believes this rule helped the wrestlers when they made the jump to WWE as it meant they had learned how to hit their time cues before appearing on live television.
“Every single one of the OVW graduates, when they went to Raw and they were on live television could hit their f*****g cues because in most cases, especially from 2002-2005, at the end of an OVW show we would barely be 30 seconds off either way, short or long, from where we had wanted to be to begin with and that’s doing it live to tape.”
Following their time in OVW, both John Cena and Randy Orton have gone on to have Hall of Fame level careers in WWE.
Credit to Wrestling Inc for the quote from Nick Dinsmore