JBL says great players rarely make great coaches, and that Bret Hart is wrong about the people producing wrestling today.
Hart said in an interview with Kenny McIntosh for Inside the Ropes that WWE’s problems come from having people telling wrestlers how to work who cannot work themselves, and named Bruce Prichard. Conrad Thompson put it to JBL on Prichard’s own show.
JBL opened by protecting the relationship.
“I love Bret. He’s been very nice to me, and I don’t want to get into an online fight with Bret Hart, because I have a lot of respect for him, and that is legitimate,” he said. “A lot of love for Bret for what he did for the business, and for me. He was always really nice to me. I would tag with Owen and Davey a lot, and always got along very well.”
Then he went at the argument through sport.
“Joe Montana wasn’t a coach. Terry Bradshaw wasn’t a coach. Lawrence Taylor wasn’t a coach. So many guys that were great players never became coaches,” JBL said. “Was Tom Landry a great player? He was probably pretty good. Was he as good as he was as a coach? Was Bill Belichick a great player?”
He said the overlap is the exception rather than the rule.
“It’s pretty rare when you have a guy like Undertaker or Triple H, or a guy like Larry Bird, who was such a great player and was a great coach. If Larry Bird had stayed with Indiana, he probably would have won several championships,” JBL said. “Very few times are great players great coaches, and I don’t think it’s necessary to be a great anything to be able to understand the business.”
He argued the producer’s job matters more now than it used to, for a specific reason.
“The producer is now more important than anything, because these guys are not wrestling every single night, so you got to have great producers, and I think these guys are doing a great job,” JBL said. He said he works with a lot of them in AAA, has been sending in his own notes, and rates them along with WWE’s and, he assumes, AEW’s.
“The fact that a guy was not a 13-time world champion and he’s a producer, I don’t think Bill Belichick was going to the Hall of Fame as a player,” he said.
On Prichard specifically, JBL went further than a defence.
“Bruce is one of the greatest producers in the history of television, and that’s no bulls***,” he said. “Bruce was a guy who came in this business, Paul Boesch trusted him, one of the greatest promoters of all time. Vince McMahon’s right-hand guy most of the time. Bruce is still the right-hand guy. There’s a reason Bruce is around so long.”
The one word he did take issue with was Hart’s choice of insult.
“I don’t want to just pick apart words, but I think idiots is strong,” JBL said. “I see it completely differently than Bret Hart does. And with that being said, that’s no disrespect to Bret, who I have a great admiration for.”
The two of them are making slightly different arguments. Jim Ross took the same side on Grilling JR this week, citing Sam Muchnick and pointing out that he booked successful cards himself without ever wrestling, while conceding that laying the matches out should go to wrestling people. Ross’ line was that the value of having wrestled is in refining an idea rather than creating it. JBL’s is that the producer’s job has grown because wrestlers work fewer nights than they used to and get less repetition, so the person in the position matters more now than at any point when Hart was working.
Both of them answered on shows Thompson hosts, and JBL answered on the show Prichard owns, which is the part worth keeping in view when reading the defence.
Prichard has been WWE’s Senior Vice President of Talent Relations since 2019 and worked for the company across three separate spells going back to 1987, in front of the camera as Brother Love and behind it in creative and production. Hart’s criticism of WWE’s creative structure predates Prichard holding the job he holds now, and he has made versions of it for the better part of two decades.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/42pA2aGwhKZyvGBRp1kvOf?si=2a644a7a24014dd0
