Jim Cornette Reveals A WWE Star Has Grown On Him
Despite saying elements of their match at WWE SummerSlam was sloppy, Jim Cornette has named a WWE star which has grown on him of late.
WWE SummerSlam 2022 kicked off with a Raw Women’s Championship match, where Bianca Belair defended against Becky Lynch. With the title holder coming out triumphant, ‘The Man’ went on to shake her opponent’s hand in a show of respect. After the contest, the pair stood together to hold off the arrival of Bayley, Iyo Sky and Dakota Kai.
Speaking on his Jim Cornette podcast following the match, the iconic booker and manager spoke of how he wasn’t originally a fan of some aspects of Belair but his opinion has now changed.
I’ve got to be honest with you, Bianca Belair grows on me. After I have gotten used to the hair ponytail flipping around and her skipping entrance, she is so happy all of the time. I have got to admit that she is really athletic and she is further along wrestling-wise than you would think that her experience would dictate.
She is from Knoxville originally, so she was in her home state. And Becky, she is an all-around worker athletically, verbally, and psychologically. They were doing a big show match here. Sorry I got to be that way but for the girls, they did a lot of stuff. But with any other two girls that I could think of in the business, or most of them, this would have been really hokey and really sloppy.
Jim Cornette went on to explain that the bits of the match which were “sloppy” actually played in to the sort of fight the duo were creating.
This was not sloppy in a botch way, this was sloppy in a contest way. They did not nail everything that they hit but they shouldn’t have, because they didn’t lose the idea of a contest. They didn’t just do spots without context or disregard every rule and not pay attention to the referee, it was a wrestling match. They dug down and worked as hard as they could to get a wrestling match over.
When you have got a limited number of girls who can do things like this, feed the underneath girls to girls like this on TV, and then match the top girls on pay-per-view, instead of the six-girl clusterf*ck matches that just take up time and drag the overall quality of the work down.
The back-and-forth now seems to be over for now between Bianca Belair and Becky Lynch, especially considering the injury suffered by Lynch during the match. Their rivalry spanned a year, starting when ‘The Man’ arrived as a surprise opponent for The EST at SummerSlam 2021.
With thanks to Inside The Ropes for the transcription.