He’s one of the most decorated champions and promoters in professional wrestling history, launching entire companies behind the scenes, then strutting to the ring, talking trash and smashing guitars over opponents’ heads.
WWE Hall of Famer and current AEW star Jeff Jarrett visits Nymeo Field at Harry Grove Stadium in Frederick, Maryland, this Friday for a different sort of Friday Night Smackdown.
“I’m looking for somebody who needs a guitar shot,” Jarrett told WTOP. “I’m looking forward to coming up to Frederick, Maryland. We’ve got a (Frederick) Keys ballgame down at the ballpark and I’m excited about that. It’s that time of year, it’s the dog days of summer and baseball goes hand in hand. I get to take a break from my AEW schedule and the wacky world of professional wrestling, I’m part owner of a baseball team over in Springfield, Illinois, so baseball is true and blue to my heart.”
Jarrett will host a meet and greet and autograph session on the concourse from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. before the Frederick Keys take on the Mahoning Valley Scrappers in MLB Draft League action, all capped off by fireworks.
“When I show up at ballparks, you never know what’s going to happen because you have all the in-game activities,” Jarrett said. “You have a little pregame, they give you a ball to maybe throw out the first pitch, so I hope everybody behind the backstop has their own gloves because you never know where a ‘Double J’ ball may end up. I’m looking forward to seeing the fans, there’s going to be a very cool autograph session and it’s fireworks night. Pretty cool.”
Wrestling royalty
They say that “wrestling has more than one royal family,” and Jarrett is living proof.
Born near Nashville, Tennessee, in 1967, Jarrett is a third-generation professional wrestler as the grandson of National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) star Eddie Marlin and the son of the legendary promoter Jerry Jarrett, who founded the Continental Wrestling Association (CWA) in 1977. That merged with World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW) to form the United States Wrestling Association (USWA) from 1989 to 1997.
“My dad was business partners with Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler,” Jarrett said. “The two guys I really watched as a young child who were my idols were ‘Fabulous’ Jackie Fargo, Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler. I’m one of five kids and the only one who continued in the business. … Back in those days, before cable television, North America was split into 22 regional territories. My father’s was the very last one that stood still promoting even into the late 90s.”
In 1986, Jeff started in CWA and became a 10-time USWA champ, dropping the belt to Lawler in 1993 to join the WWF. Adopting a country music gimmick as the heel “Double J,” Jarrett’s first pay-per-view was “Royal Rumble 1994,” eliminated by Randy Savage. The next year, at “Royal Rumble 1995,” Jarrett beat Razor Ramon to become Intercontinental Champion, sparking a rematch at “WrestleMania XI” before losing the title to Shawn Michaels.
“A match that I had against Shawn Michaels, an ‘In Your House’ pay-per-view in July of 1995, in a lot of ways has stood the test of time; it’s one of my favorites,” Jarrett said. “I’m asked that question quite often, ‘Give me some favorite matches,’ but I always like to say the series of matches that I had with Shawn Michaels or Razor Ramon.”
After briefly joining World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in 1996, Jarrett returned to WWF in 1997 for an NWA invasion with Jim Cornette, lost a hair match to X-Pac at “SummerSlam 1998” and had European and Intercontinental bouts against Val Venis, Ken Shamrock, The Godfather, Big Bossman, Edge and D’Lo Brown. Jarrett also formed a memorable tag team with Owen Hart, who tragically died by falling from the rafters in 1999.
“It was less than a year that we got to tag together, but it was a special time,” Jarrett said. “Getting the opportunity to actually be a tag partner with one of your best friends is always special and unique. We were both sons of promoters, that was our original common bond, then we grew to become great friends, loved each other and got tight. The tragedy, for many years, just overshadowed it because it was a such a tragic and sudden passing.”
New beginnings
After his WWF contract expired in 1999, he dropped his Intercontinental title to Chyna on his way out the door in a shrewd business decision to rejoin WCW. The move paid off, at least in the short term. As “The Chosen One,” Jarrett became the WCW heavyweight champion four times, twice in matches against Diamond Dallas Page (mixing it up with Eric Bischoff and David Arquette), once against Kevin Nash and another time against Ric Flair.
“Every contract, set of circumstances throughout my career always comes down to two things: obviously the money, that’s what pays the bills, but it’s also about the next stage of your career. Where do you see yourself growing?” Jarrett said. “To finally fulfill that goal of (winning) the big gold belt, as they say in WCW, it was definitely a lifelong goal, so I put my mind on that and it became a reality.”
Sadly, backstage politics and the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger came to a head at WCW’s “Bash at the Beach 2000” with Jarrett lying down in the ring for an easy victory by Hulk Hogan, who left town with the title belt. Then, head writer Vince Russo made an unscripted appearance in the ring to trash Hogan and announce the real title match would happen later that night between Jarrett and Booker T, who pinned Jarrett to become champ.
“Like any business, wrestling isn’t immune to it, the politics became so involved,” Jarrett said. “Literally, we don’t have enough time to go into that. It has been covered from multiple different angles, but the ‘Bash at the Beach’ was a microcosm of how WCW management was run.”
Ted Turner’s former pride and joy of WCW was bought by then-WWF chairman Vince McMahon in 2001, putting an end to the highly rated “Monday Night Wars” between WWF “Raw” and WCW “Nitro,” where one in 10 Americans regularly watched wrestling on Monday nights. This forced Jarrett to team with his father to form their own wrestling company, NWA: Total Nonstop Action (TNA), in 2002.
“Television executives didn’t understand the DNA. They knew ‘Nitro’ and ‘Thunder’ were Top 5 programs in the Turner networks, but they canceled the show,” Jarrett said. “Without a No. 1, there’s no such thing as a No. 2, and vice versa, a huge void in the marketplace. So we launched TNA. They just celebrated another ‘Slammiversary.’ It’s still going today, hats off to those guys. It was a company that was near and dear to my heart from 2002 to 2013.”
His decade-plus run in TNA was his longest and most consistent tenure, becoming the NWA World Heavyweight Champion six times with a string of stellar matches with memorable opponents across the board.
“I really think a young AJ Styles, there’s some real hidden Easter eggs, if you will, in those early days of TNA between me and AJ,” Jarrett said. “Then, of course, my series of matches in 2010 and 2011 with Kurt Angle. At that stage in my career, me and Kurt, it was super competitive and very, very physical in so many ways, but it’s a series of matches that I’m very proud of as well.”
After exiting TNA in 2013 when the company was bought by Dixie Carter, Jarrett was inducted into the TNA Hall of Fame in 2015, followed by a surprise induction into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2018. While his body of work deserved it, Jarrett was visibly emotional when he got the call from WWE after so many years in rival companies.
“It was shocking,” Jarrett said. “I had come out of a very dark period of my life at the end of 2017, and 2018 started off early January, I got that call and I was humbled. It was a very surprising move, but also a very humbling move.”
In 2022, Jarrett signed with AEW, becoming the director of business development behind the scenes and aligning with Jay Lethal on screen in a feud with Darby Allin.
You could say that Jarrett’s launching of TNA to rival WWE paved the way for Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks to do the same with Ring of Honor’s “All In” pay-per-view in 2018, after which Shahid and Tony Khan officially trademarked and formed AEW as the chief rival of WWE.
“It’s two entirely different sets of circumstances,” Jarrett said. “It fundamentally changed the business in a very positive way. For so long, the opportunity to have a challenger brand was difficult, but when you are on two hours of TBS every Wednesday night, two hours Saturday night on TNT, and now Friday nights … it changes so many things about the business.”
Nowadays, the self-proclaimed “King of the Mountain” is still going strong on AEW television, as well as his podcast, “My World with Jeff Jarrett.” He insists the state of the business has never been stronger.
And that’s the bottom line, not because Stone Cold said so, nor because you smell what The Rock is cooking, but because you heard it straight from the signature “slap” lips of “J-E-Double-F, J-A-Double-R, E-Double-T!”
Listen to our full conversation on the podcast below:
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