There are a lot of times I find out of what’s going on in wrestling solely based on one of my close friends sending me a random text message commentating on something that he’s watching live and I’m not. Just the other day, he sends me a message saying:
We’re going to see if we’re right about Jeff Jarrett being a company killer
I laughed because of the time of day it was and that it was on a Wednesday, I knew that Jeff Jarrett had finally decided to become hashtagALLELITE and that he had shown up on AEW. The real question was who he bashed his balsa wood fake guitar on, because Jeff Jarrett literally does nothing other than that spot.
A quick Google search confirmed that Jeff Jarrett was definitely ALLELITE and had done so by bashing his balsa wood fake guitar over Darby Allin, which I probably could’ve guessed in maybe three or four tries, because for some reason, Darby Allin seems to be completely okay with being a gatekeeper for the company in which all incoming talent seems to gravitate towards, and usually beats the unholy shit out of him at some point.
Regardless, let’s get back to Jeff Jarrett, and the claim that he’s a company killer. After all, the Jarrett family is somewhat low country wrestling royalty in the regard that they’ve been running promotions for generations now, but Jeff himself has been varying degrees of involved with primarily TNA which is now Impact! Wrestling, but also the NWA, Global Force, GCW and even with some appearances with New Japan. At no point in his involvement with any of these promotions did they ever really light the world on fire, and only in his time with TNA was Jeff himself remotely close to being anything of a superstar in the industry.
The reputation comes from the fact that none of these promotions ever really benefit from the addition of Jeff Jarrett, feeding the narratives that the WWE put onto him that he was never really more than a mid-card ceiling kind of guy. Furthermore, Jeff Jarrett has been around long enough, to where he’s gotten to be involved with various factions and trends throughout the years, but again, not in a particularly good way.
I ilke to describe Jeff Jarrett as kind of wrestling’s version of the Family Guy joke killer meme, where once Family Guy makes a reference to something popular, that thing is immediately uncool and dead in the water right then and there. Jeff Jarrett had the misfortune of being added to the nWo 2000 stable during his time in WCW which lasted all of like a month; it’s easy to say it’s because WCW couldn’t book a fish into water, or that Bret Hart’s career was already over, but let’s be real, it was because it was Jeff Jarrett was a member.
Nearly 15 years later, after Jarrett had lost TNA and was spinning his wheels with Global Force, during a show in partnership with New Japan, Jeff Jarrett shocks (read: surprises nobody) when he brandishes a balsa wood fake guitar with the Bullet Club logo on it and bashes it over Hiroshi Tanahashi, effectively joining the evil gaijin stable. Needless to say, all the coolness of Bullet Club flew out the window faster than the hopes and dreams of everyone trying to win Powerball, and the stable hasn’t recovered since.
Earlier this year, Jeff Jarrett has been clawing at relevancy in any way shape or form, derailing promotions left and right. For all the exposure and life Matt Cardona had injected into GCW, all it took was Jeff Jarrett appearing on their THE WRLD ppv, where he buried Effy, and GCW hasn’t recovered since. Jeff Jarrett was Ric Flair’s LAST MATCH EVERRRR, and it’s almost like the marks who put the show together were trying to hedge their bets by preemptively calling their Jim Crockett Promotions show a one-time deal, but it’s really like they’re restauranteurs who already saw the writing on the wall when working with Double-J and didn’t bother promoting anything beyond the single show, if it meant being associated with him.
Even the WWE wasn’t safe from the stink of Jeff Jarrett, as he was brought in for some reason to be a special referee for the feud between the Usos and Street Profits, and not long afterward, the Vince McMahon scandal blew up, and of all the people and shots that have been fired at him throughout the decades, really all it took was having to work with Jeff Jarrett that seems to have effectively killed such an unkillable career.
So, hopefully Tony Khan knows what he’s doing in getting into bed with Jeff Jarrett, because as history has proven throughout the millennium, doing business with Jeff Jarrett has often come with some seriously bad consequences.
