Jim Cornette has given his thoughts on wrestlers who go from being in intense feuds with one another to teaming up.
Answering a fan’s question on his Drive Thru podcast, Cornette discussed Junkyard Dog teaming up with Michael Hayes in WCW in the late 1980’s with little explanation. The two had been bitter enemies in their Mid-South Wrestling days earlier in the decade, with Hayes and his Fabulous Freebirds teammates even temporarily blinding JYD with hair-removal cream.
Cornette explained that the pair teaming up was almost a decade removed from the feud, and WCW and WWF believed that things that occurred outside of their company didn’t matter anyway.
“At that point, except for the mid-South area obviously[…] the angle was so hot there, but nobody had seen it on national television, it was eight years removed and nobody was thinking about it. I don’t think[…] whoever was responsible for this particular period would have given two s***s anyway, unfortunately. The fans who had seen it and knew how big it was, and knew how hot it was, their brains had to explode, and well it exposed the business for them to be standing there with no f*****g mentions, no issues, and whatever.
“Even back then, when everything started expanding, and the two big companies started thinking ‘nothing matters unless we did it’. Both sides were guilty of that.”
To show how two wrestlers teaming up after a heated feud could work well, he used the example of Dusty Rhodes taking almost a year to trust Ole Anderson enough to team with him.
“In the south, remember in Atlanta, one of the best turns ever, was Ole Anderson turning babyface and spending that year teaming with Tommy Rich, Tony Atlas, and Wrestling II, all so that he could make up to Dusty Rhodes and get Dusty to agree to be his partner after their blood feud where they had screamed ‘it will never be over!’ Then finally, after a year, he gets him in one match, then two matches, and he says ‘How about a cage?’ and he does that, and then there you go.”
Cornette finished by comparing this method of slowly building to two rivals teaming up with the way he sees it being done in WWF.
“A lot of companies, especially the WWF, guys just turned and, you know, f**k it.”
“I think [Vince McMahon] was just, ’We’re going to explain it, he turned, boom, move on!’”
The trend Jim Cornette noted has continued into the modern era, with unexpected tag teams such as ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and Triple H, or Sheamus and Cesaro dropping their rivalries to join forces and even go on to great success in the tag team ranks.
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