Jim Ross
Jim Ross was a guest on the Straight Shooters podcast on Wildfire Radio. Ross talked about WWE’s tribute to Jimmy Snuka, Kurt Angle in the Hall of Fame, and much more. You can read highlights below:
On Jimmy Snuka and WWE’s tribute to him:
“I had no issues with it. I was glad they recognized it and recognized his passing. For wrestling fans, for many of them, he meant a lot to a generation of fans. I’m glad that they acknowledged it.
“It’s the wrong form, in my view, to continue to wear out a topic of a trial that never happened and a court case that’s been dismissed. I don’t know what happened and all this other stuff regarding Jimmy and the lady that was murdered. But golly, there’s a time and place to discuss those issues. And one would think that we’d have enough intelligence to let the family – he had a lot of kids, man. They have friends and they have cousins and I think to just let the family grieve before we go back on this Oliver Stone quest of proving Jimmy Snuka posthumously was a murderer. It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing.”
On Kurt Angle being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame:
“Kurt and I communicate like everybody else in this world we live in, by text, or direct message or something. So I know he’s been working very diligently to get clean and sober for quite some time. It’s not been easy but he seems to be well on the right road to that sobriety. I think that, I don’t know this, but I would assume WWE made a thorough evaluation of where he was health-wise before they pursued this matter. And some people say, ‘Well, it’s a long time coming.’ Damn right, it’s a long time coming. But it was a long time for him to get his priorities back together and for him to stop making bad decisions. So thank God he’s doing really well. I saw him in England in October. He had a match and looked great. I can see him having a match here and there. Nobody can debate the fact if Kurt Angle can have a match. Of course he can have a match. The issue is how often do you want to saddle him up and run him back out the track and take him back to the barn and bring him back out. I just don’t see the money in that. I see a one-off deal at best. And call it a day. He doesn’t owe anybody four more matches or six more matches or anything. I think that he could have a big match if it was made that way, a significant match for WWE. A one-off deal. But if that doesn’t happen, I wrote about this on my blog on my website, I think that it’s important that we honor his career and not the fact about making this whole thing about one more match.”
On the Royal Rumble:
“Broadcasting the Royal Rumble match is as challenging a task as you’d have throughout the year. It’s going to be over an hour and your stories change at the same intervals that the talents are entered. Then the stories change again when talents are eliminated. So every entry and every exit creates a new story. It’s very challenging thing to mentally put the narrative to the picture you’re seeing.
“Tazz and I did that event, and he’s never done one. I think if you’d ask him he’d probably tell you we had a lot of fun, it was comfortable, but boy, it’s hard work. It’s really, truly hard work.
“The thing about making predictions for the Royal Rumble, it’s fun to talk about and shoot the breeze with your buddies or whatever. If you’re serious about creative, it’s hard to do a good job of intelligently predicting Royal Rumble finishes unless you know the card for WrestleMania. If I was in the booking world, by the time I got to San Antonio on Sunday, January 29th, I would make sure I had my WrestleMania card, at least the top half of it, booked.”
