Legendary wrestling manager Jim Cornette spent a lot of time working behind the scenes at WWE, and as part of his responsibilities, he would tell Vince McMahon what he thought about certain wrestlers. Given the former WWE owner hired and sometimes championed those people getting evaluated, you might think it was uncomfortable for Cornette and others to be honest with him, but apparently that’s not the case at all.
Cornette was on his podcast this week when he busted out some old notes he found of talent evaluations he did for McMahon all the way back in 1997. Some of them are vicious. After reading a particularly aggressive one about Sable, co-host Brian Last asked if McMahon would have been mad at him for dragging her, given how hard he was pushing her at the time. Here was Cornette’s response…
Vince wouldn’t have been upset if I’d have written about his own family (and said they) were the shits on TV. He looked at all of it dispassionately… (With) Vince McMahon, you could say any goddamn thing. He didn’t give a shit from a getting mad point of view when you’re (doing evaluations). He was as cold as ice about that stuff.
McMahon certainly had a style of wrestling he enjoyed, and his personal taste definitely had a major impact on what WWE fans got. That being said, he was also typically quick to move on from something that wasn’t working, even if it was his idea. He fired hundreds of wrestlers that he previously brought in, and he even fired his own son Shane McMahon, who had a complicated relationship with, because he was unhappy with how he booked the 2022 Royal Rumble.
Because of that, it’s no surprise he didn’t care if the people working for him were aggressive or mean in their evaluations of various performers. Cornette is widely considered one of the most ornery and no-nonsense personalities in the history of wrestling, and McMahon employed him on and off for many years. For a long time, he even put Cornette in charge of WWE’s primary developmental territory where he was tasked with training John Cena, Brock Lesnar, Randy Orton and Batista, among many others.
Clearly, he wanted honesty out of Cornette, and while he didn’t take his advice on Sable (or Fatu, who later became Rikishi), he respected his often thoughtful perspective on others. In fact, it's pretty clear from the talent evaluations that for a few other performers, he did listen.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the talent evaluations Cornette read were the performers he was actually positive on. All of the people he was asked to evaluate were apparently under consideration to be let go, and Cornette spoke very strongly in favor of Billy Gunn and Road Dogg, as well as Bradshaw. He told McMahon that Gunn and Road Dogg had future tag team champions potential and that Bradshaw should be pushed as more of a brawler and badass.
McMahon seemed to view success in a more holistic way. It wasn’t about getting any specific character over or making something specific work, though he would give performers multiple chances if he thought they had big upside. Instead, it was about tinkering with the resources he had in order to continually eliminate the stuff that wasn’t going to work in order to find more space to experiment with stuff that could work.
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