Alex Shelley heaps praise on the great Jeff Jarrett.
The IMPACT World Champion spoke about Double-J during a virtual signing with Captain’s Corner, where he called the current AEW Director of Business Development the smartest man in all of pro-wrestling. Shelley explains that the wrestling business would be forever different without Jarrett in it, citing his creation of TNA and his work in WWE/WCW as prime examples.
He’s (Jeff Jarrett) probably the smartest man in wrestling, isn’t he? He’s probably the smartest guy I’ve ever met. He’s just a genius. He survived in different eras of wrestling and he’s just had so many different experiences and just wrestled everybody. F*ck, how can you not be a genius at that point? Coming up in Memphis like that and then to transition that to WWF style, that’s totally different, right? That’s a totally different ballgame so from a wrestler’s standpoint, the things that you were doing that worked there aren’t necessarily gonna work up north but they did and then to go from there to WCW at the right time and then go back to WWF and to have a gimmick given to him or he decided, I don’t know which but it wasn’t necessarily all that great with the NWA stuff. Remember when he had the Miami — the Dolphins colors kind of? And then to transition that into cutting his hair off in a match with X-Pac and then becoming a top tier heel, it’s just incredible, and starting a company. Without Jeff Jarrett, the wrestling business as we know it would be totally different. I mean totally different. I don’t know if we (Motor City Machine Guns) would have had careers in all honesty so, utmost respect for Jeff.
Shelley later points out how good Jarrett was in the main event of Ric Flair’s Last Match, where he and Jay Lethal were defeated by the Nature Boy and Andrade El Idolo.
I thought he kind of stole the show on (Ric) Flair’s Last Match too. When I was watching, like man, everybody’s doing great but, I can’t take my eyes off Jeff. I don’t know what it is.
Elsewhere in the signing, Shelley spoke about the Time Splitters (Him and KUSHIDA) and how they were set to have an expanded run in WWE until the COVID-19 outbreak ruined it. You can read about that here.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)