The Watch List takes a look at what matches you should be watching while you’re at home and they come recommended by your favorite professional wrestling stars.
WrestleZone recently spoke with Jeff Jarrett, who was asked to pick the most memorable matches from his respective runs in WWF and TNA. For his WWF pick, Jarrett called back to his initial run with the company in the early 1990s (he was also there from 1997-99) and said he really enjoyed the “real simplicity” working with Shawn Michaels, someone who was an opponent and a brief ally.
Jarrett and Michaels shared the ring 30 times throughout their respective careers, teaming up several times and facing off as opponents. The tag team run Jarrett mentioned saw him with Michaels in twelve matches in March of 1995 against Diesel and Razor Ramon; Jarrett and Michaels also faced off later that year for the Intercontinental Championship six times. Five of those matches took place on live events, while the final match saw Michaels win the title at WWF In Your House 2 on July 23, 1995.
“The real simplicity of me and Shawn [Michaels]—and I had some really great matches I felt with Razor Ramon, Scott Hall, and the Chyna match was obviously talked about in so many different ways for so many different reasons—but some of the things that aren’t really talked about that I just remember very, very fondly [were working with Shawn]. We had a series of tag matches, me and Shawn, against Scott and Kevin, Razor and Diesel and those tag matches were some of the most fun I’ve ever had in the ring,” Jarrett explained. “They were also some of the most grueling and hard-hitting, and that was a time in my career that you can just imagine in ’94 or ’95 where all of us are at in our careers. I look back on it and I can remember coming to the curtain and many, many times, whether it was the man himself [Vince McMahon] or someone else going ‘you tore it down’, and that was very rewarding to put together something like that. So, that would be one of my favorites, those series of matches in WWE.”
For his favorite TNA matches, Jarrett pointed to his feud with Kurt Angle that resulted in some hard-hitting fights, as well as his work with AJ Styles in the early days of the company.
“At that stage of my career, the matches that I had with Kurt, you look where we were at 10 years ago, I was early 40s and I didn’t expect to have those type of level of matches with Kurt. His timing, yes he’s a great athlete but his timing and his ear for the business in those series of matches, I’m very proud of. We beat the hell out of each other and were super aggressive but we had a parking lot brawl, a real hard-hitting one,” Jarrett explained, “we had cage matches, we had all kinds of matches but those series of matches were some of my very favorites. And obviously, my early AJ Styles matches—he and I laughed about those through the years—but we were both [at different points of our careers]. I’m trying to start up a company and he’s a young guy but when we got in the ring, we had great chemistry.”
You can check out some free-to-watch full-length matches from Jarrett’s TNA Wrestling career below; his WWF matches with Shawn Michaels are available on Peacock.
Monty Brown vs. Jeff Jarrett
TNA Final Resolution — January 16, 2005
Jeff Jarrett vs. Christian Cage
TNA Against All Odds — February 12, 2006
Sting vs. Jeff Jarrett
TNA Bound For Glory — October 22, 2006
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