Legendary wrestling manager, promoter and booker Jim Cornette shot on a former local wrestling promoter, Marvin Ward, a name I hadn’t heard out loud in years, for lots of good reasons, on Cornette’s top-rated podcast last week.
Which, naturally, got me nervous.
You’ll see why.
“I don’t mean to turn this into the Marvin Ward Hour,” Cornette said in a sidebar on his “Jim Cornette Experience” podcast last week, at the end of a discussion of indy wrestling promoters and bookers.
Preface: I’m a regular Cornette podcast listener, long-time fan, occasional critic – only for some of his takes on modern wrestling; he can be too hard on AEW, not hard enough on WWE.
My take: they both deserve to be taken to the woodshed, early and often.
I’m a regular listener to both of Cornette’s weekly podcasts, the “Experience” and “Jim Cornette’s Drive-Thru”; I don’t expect to hear the name of the somebody who talked me into a brief tenure in the ‘rasslin business more than a decade ago as one of the topics.
ICYMI
The segment where Ward’s name came up had Cornette defending his own record as an indy promoter and booker, with a discussion of several who were moderately successful – OK, pretty much Paul Heyman, who ended up filing for bankruptcy at the end of his ECW run, and then asterisks for Dutch Mantell and Gabe Sapolsky.
Cornette, for his part, didn’t go bankrupt with his Knoxville, Tennessee,-based Smoky Mountain Wrestling promotion, but Smoky Mountain did lose around $2 million before Cornette closed it down for good in 1995.
As I can attest to personally, it’s hard – practically impossible – to not lose gobs of money trying to be an indy wrestling promoter.
More on how I know in a hot minute.
After an obligatory jab at The Young Bucks, the Cornette podcast discussion got to Ward – and, gotta admit here, my fear as I listened was, hearing my name associated with old Marvo, because he recruited me to the business in 2011 to be a part of the PR and creative team behind a run of local shows that year, which culminated, against any good reason, with a live TV pay-per-view emanating out of Augusta Expo, “Night of Legends.”
The pay-per-view was the idea of the money mark, who asked me to research how ECW and TNA had done with its pay-per-view events; my advice, after crunching the numbers, was, don’t do it, but the money mark had backers who wanted to launch a weekly TV show, and they’d told him they needed a proof of concept to move forward.
The show drew a solid live gate – it was a local sellout, with more than 2,500 packed into the bleachers and ringside – but a flop on pay-per-view, and panned by the reviewers, so, there was that, in terms of proof of concept.
Ward wanted to follow up on the local business, and engaged me to assist with a pair of shows in 2013, and the best thing I can say is, I didn’t end up homeless at the end of it all.
I’ll still never figure out how we lost money on the second show, which had 1,900 fans on hand at Waynesboro High School for a Kevin Nash/Sean Waltman vs. Rock ‘n’ Roll Express main event.
Actually, I know well how that was the case – Marvin blew the budget that we’d set for the show into the stratosphere.
That was it for me; if you can’t make money in the wrestling business with a sellout crowd, there are better things to do with your time and money.
Ward went back underground for a while, re-emerging in 2018 with an announced event that was supposed to feature a meet-and-greet with WWE stars The Undertaker and Kane; the event, scheduled for April 2019, never came off, for a variety of reasons/excuses.
ICYMI
Cornette, it turns out, had also been booked for that event, in a manner of speaking.
As Cornette told the story on this week’s “Experience,” the two were at a wrestling convention, “and (Ward) was, like, two or three aisles over from me, and I’m doing my own thing, and so one of the boys or somebody came over and say, Hey, Marvin Ward really wants to book you on that show.”
Cornette’s response: “f–k Marvin Ward.”
The backstory there: Ward had agreed to book two shows in the 1990s for Smoky Mountain, then reneged at the last minute, leaving Cornette holding the bag, having to pay the contracted talent for their bookings.
A decade later, as Cornette told the story, Ward paid Cornette and Dennis Condrey, the late member of The Midnight Express tag team, to drive up to Waynesboro so that Ward could pick their brains on how to position himself in the wrestling promotion business.
“He literally paid us 1,500 bucks apiece to have a meeting with him, and never listened to any goddamn thing we said,” Cornette said.
At the 2018 convention, Cornette, wary, for good reason, to get entangled again with Marvin Ward, told the intermediary to tell Ward he’d do his show “for five grand,” and Ward agreed, “sight unseen.”
“I actually talked to him on the phone about it after, you know, the show was over and everything. I said, Marvin, if you really want me to come to wherever for $5,000, I’ll do it, but I need x in advance and then y when I show up, and the reservations and whole nine yards, and it was, OK, no problem. And then x never came, and then I never heard from him again, and he didn’t run that show, and he was gone again somewhere,” Cornette said.
That, also, was the last I heard of Marvin Ward, though it’s been forever since I’ve heard from Marvin Ward.
Seems to me that we’re probably due for Marvin to pop up out of nowhere with an announcement about another upcoming show any day now.
Video: Jim Cornette shoots on Marvin Ward
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