The legendary Jim Cornette has finally given his thoughts on the tragic passing of the late Jon ‘Brodie Lee’ Huber.
Cornette, who has been critical of AEW in the past, began by stating what a shock it was to learn of the passing on the latest edition of his Jim Cornette Experience Podcast:
“When you say shocking, has this every happened before in 125 years of professional wrestling, that a guy has been actually on television, in a big main event match, promotion, national television whatever the case and then suddenly without being in a car accident or something like that…I mean forty one years old, I didn’t know he was that old, obviously the only thing that we know is that they said it was a non-COVID lung issue, but just how does that even f***ing happen?”
Both Cornette and co-host Brian Last talked at length about the last time they had both heard Huber – on the AEW Unrestricted Podcast prior to his passing – before Jim talked about the professional criticism he’d given him in the past and rescinding everything he’d said in the knowledge that the former AEW TNT Champion was working with an unknown illness:
“Now people out there are gonna say, ‘well you’ve never said anything good about AEW’, f**k. Seriously we’ll get to that in a minute, but this was a guy who I’ve never met him, I’ve never seen him in person and had seen very little of his stuff in the WWE because we weren’t watching the shows or reviewing the shows then or whatever. But I’d always heard that everyone said, ‘this guy’s great’ and ‘he’s fantastic’, so when we saw the whole thing and this is not the time to litigate AEW’s booking but a lot of people were rolling their eyes at Dark Order before he got there, so I rolled my eyes when he showed up because…there you go. I, however, in light of this I rescind any of my criticism of him as a wrestler because…you don’t just get something like this and boom you’re done, apparently it was there and he didn’t know it so if he’s wrestling with that serious of a lung issue I rescind any of my criticisms of him as a wrestler. The booking still stands. I apologise for my criticism of this guys wrestling, if he was labouring under those handicaps. It’s overly shocking.”
Finally, Jim complimented AEW, Tony Khan and those wrestlers who knew about Huber’s condition for keeping it a secret for the sake of his family, stating that he could never remember a secret of this magnitude ever being kept in the wrestling industry:
“You know, there’s always been and this goes back 60 years…there’re three main forms of communication, telephone, telegraph and tell-a-wrestler, but apparently a lot of people in the company knew about this for a while and because they all liked him so much and they promised his family and you don’t want people talking about it, nobody said anything. This is the first secret of this magnitude I can ever remember being kept in the wrestling business by that many people.”
Jim Cornette’s comments will be added to the testimony of thousands who have paid verbal and physical tribute to an extraordinary and kind man. The extent of his influence on the wrestling industry was evident across multiple promotions this past week with WWE, MLW and most notably AEW honouring his memory.
Jon ‘Brodie Lee’ Huber passed away on December 26 from a non-COVID related lung issue.
Credit for the interview: The Jim Cornette Experience