Jimmy Jacobs never appeared on camera for WWE, spending his 2 1/2 year tenure with the company entirely behind the scenes as part of the creative team. A gig in front of the cameras almost happened, though.
On a recent episode of Chris Jericho's Talk Is Jericho podcast, Jacobs told the story of trying out to be a manager for the company in 2011, describing it as "the closest I ever came to performing for them."
It all started when Jamie Noble called Jacobs, noting that Vince McMahon was looking to add some managers. Noble then invited Jacobs to come to an upcoming Raw in Detroit.
"I'm all decked out; I'm in my ridiculous suit, my hair's up, I've got jewelry, got the makeup on, because that's kind of how I dress when I dress up," Jacobs recalled, adding, "They bring me to Brooklyn Brawler, they had me film a promo and I think I knocked it out of the park. Brawler was very impressed. He was like, 'Wow, you can talk. do you mind if I go to Johnny Ace and try to get him to hire you?' "
As Jacobs recalled, Brawler, Noble, CM Punk and Daniel Bryan all had separate conversations with Johnny Ace, lobbying on Jacobs' behalf.
"Jamie Noble comes up to me at the end of the day and says, it's looking pretty good. He's like, come to Smackdown tomorrow and we'll see," Jacobs said.
Jacobs did just that and was surprised by the welcome--or lack therof.
"It was like the day before didn't exist. I didn't exist. Nothing," Jacobs said.
Jericho asked Jacobs what happened to change things. Jacobs leaned on his own recently concluded experience as part of WWE creative to try and interpret the chain of events.
"What I can guess happened now, now that I've seen the inside of things, one week Vince is like 'These guys can't talk we need managers!' so Vince is on this kick for one second, the producers and writers go out and try to find managers and then Vince is over it the next week."
Click here to listen to Jacobs' entire appearance on Jericho's podcast.
