When Bobby Lashley signed a developmental contract with WWE in 2004, he was completely new to the wrestling business, and that ended up almost being catastrophic for Jim Cornette.
During a recent appearance on the Sam Roberts Wrestling Podcast, Lashley recalled a segment with an in-ring confrontation involving himself, his manager and Cornette, who was both the on- and off-screen authority in Ohio Valley Wrestling for several years. The segment culminated with Lashley giving Cornette a body slam.
"I picked him up and, for some reason, he came up like nothing. I was like, 'Oh Shit!' I threw him down and, instead of body slamming him, I almost picked him up and lawn darted him—right down," Lashley recalled. "His body just crumbles."
According to Lashley, Cornette quickly left the building after making it to the back. Lashley, knowing Cornette's position in OVW and also his past reputation -- "I'd heard him cut promos on people before", he said -- Lashley figured he was about to be fired so he went home and started packing.
The next day, however, Cornette did unleash a verbal rant -- but at everyone else on the roster. Being slammed so viciously by Lashley had made Cornette realize that everyone else in OVW at the time had been stiffing Lashley on slams by going dead weight. But Lashley, a national-level amateur wrestler, never had noticed.
"He's yelling at everybody there, except me," Lashley said. "I was like, what's going on? He says, 'The reason why this motherf----- is doing this and picking me up and almost killed me is because you stiff bastards are trying to dead weight him all the time.' But the whole thing was, when I first came in, I think everybody was just trying to dead weight me. But I didn't know anything because I was in wrestling and we had to pick people up and slam them anyway."
Lashley told Roberts during the interview that Cornette brought up the incident during a recent round of tapings of Impact Wrestling. Cornette, ironically, is already done with the Impact promotion.
