JBL does not think there is anything wrong with Adam Pearce only watching WWE, and says he did exactly the same thing during the Monday Night Wars.
Pearce drew criticism after saying he does not watch other promotions. JBL was asked about it on Something To Wrestle and took his side.
“The company that pays him has about 100 hours a week of television, so there’s not really a lot more you can watch. They have so much content now. I don’t know how you keep up with all of it, just in the one company. So I don’t know how you’d be able to watch other stuff.”
He said his own record on this is no better.
“I didn’t watch WCW when I was working with WWE, even though we had this huge war going on, because we didn’t have time. We were traveling every night. And it wasn’t just that I was loyal to the company that paid me. I would have loved to watch some of their stuff. I just didn’t have time to do it.”
He does not have time now either, and listed what he does keep up with.
“I keep up with AAA obviously, because that’s the commentary that I do, and I keep up with WWE enough to know the product. I watch more through social media clips than I do the show itself, but I do keep up with it.”
“I don’t have any time in the world to keep up with AEW or TNA or anybody else. No offense to those groups. It’s just there’s only so many hours in the day, and there’s so much wrestling on. I can’t believe how much wrestling is on right now, and the ratings these guys are still doing with all this product on TV.”
The exception he named is Jamie Noble.
“Jamie Noble is one of the biggest wrestling bugs I’ve ever seen. He would watch stuff all the time. That’s all he did. He’d watch videos. Probably one of the reasons he’s such a great producer right now.”
“But most guys don’t do that. Most guys are busy living whatever life they had. For Jamie, that was his hobby. That’s what he loved doing.”
He rejected the idea that not watching says anything about a person’s commitment.
“I know some people would argue, oh, that must mean he doesn’t really love it. I kind of disagree on that.”
“I’m completely with Adam Pearce here. People can have their own opinion. They make up their mind what they want to have issues with. But I don’t see a real rationale to get upset with him about saying that.”
He did disagree with Pearce on one thing. Pearce has said he does not think people want to see him wrestle.
“I disagree with him about whether people want to see him or not. I think people would enjoy seeing him, just like they enjoyed seeing Nick Aldis. I think they would enjoy seeing him. He’s a really good worker, and I’m sure he still is.”
Aldis, the SmackDown General Manager, wrestled GUNTHER at SummerSlam on night one, his first WWE match and his first anywhere since 2023. He gave up the General Manager role to sign the contract and was reinstated after the loss. Asked what the last match he watched outside WWE was, JBL went back a century.
“The last match I watched that was outside of WWE was Jim Londos and Primo Carnera. Somebody had sent it to me. He’s a great match. You realize how good a worker Jim Londos was. He put it together. The big man Primo Carnera was a big dude.”
He also watched a Bronko Nagurski match, and had a view on which athlete made the best transition.
“That’s about the greatest football player that turned into a wrestler. It had to be Bronko Nagurski, I would think, or Wahoo.”
“I still love wrestling, and I love matches. When somebody sends me some stuff, I happily watch them. But I’m not going to watch an entire show, because I just have other stuff that I’m doing, and the wrestling that I watch is pretty much part of what I do.”
“There’s a finite number of hours in the day, and I’m a huge wrestling fan.”
Pearce is a five-time NWA World Heavyweight Champion who joined WWE in 2015 as a producer and has been an on-screen authority figure since 2020. He is now the Raw General Manager.
