We’ve been big fans of the recent NWA Powerrr YouTube show from the National Wrestling Alliance, with its classic studio wrestling vibe and throwback aesthetic, so we weren’t sure why we couldn’t find the latest episode on Tuesday evening. As it turns out, the episode had been uploaded but taken down after a controversial line of commentary from, get this, Jim Cornette.
During Nick Aldis’ match against Trevor Murdoch, Cornette put over Murdoch’s toughness with a folksy colloquialism that went in what you could generously call an, “unexpected direction.” Your expectations here may vary.
https://twitter.com/CeeHawk/status/1196936758363119618
“Trevor Murdoch, he’s mad, bad, and dangerous … he’s the only man I’ve ever known that could strap a bucket of fried chicken on his back and ride a motor scooter across Ethiopia.”
If your first response to that was, “he was just joking about how hungry starving people are,” first of all, what, and second of all, consider that Cornette could’ve said, I don’t know, “pizza” or “hamburgers” and not hit that very specific tone he was going for. Additionally, there are parts of early 1980s southern wrestling we just don’t have to keep alive.
As an interesting side note, this isn’t the first time Cornette’s used that exact line on commentary. In 1995, he dropped it during a Bob Backlund vs. Buck Quartermain match on Monday Night Raw.
#NWAPowerrr wasn't the first time Jim Cornette made the fried-chicken-Ethiopia joke. Here's a clip from March 6th, 1995. pic.twitter.com/h3APMzGHl3
— Art O'Donnell (@Art0Donnell) November 20, 2019
On Wednesday morning, the National Wrestling Alliance announced that Cornette had resigned from the promotion.
Effective immediately: Jim Cornette has resigned from the National Wrestling Alliance. As an announcer on the November 19th edition of NWA Power, Jim made remarks during a singles match between Nick Aldis and Trevor Murdoch that were both offensive and do not meet the high standards of decency and good faith of the National Wrestling Alliance.
To ensure that such an error can never happen again, we’ve established new procedures of review for all NWA programming going forward.
We sincerely regret our failure in this regard.
So here’s to a version of NWA’s very enjoyable studio wrestling show without Cornette, and to six more months of Corny calling people gay pussy snowflakes on Twitter for not thinking southern closet racism should get the same amount of laughs and applause on a global platform in 2019 as it did in the various Tennessee and Carolina towns on his territory loop in 1982. Joe Galli and Dave Marquez deserve better, anyway.
