People can say whatever they will about Jim Cornette whether as a wrestling personality or a person, but the guy’s love for wrestling cannot be ignored

Cornett is a true wordsmith. “My lawyers will sue you until you’re so broke you can’t even pay attention.” Is fuckin crazy😂

Tim Horner thinking he was going to be the top guy is hilarious.

SMW was the prototype for what OVW and eventually NXT became.

I've watched around 40 episodes of SMW, the biggest takeaway I have was everyone from the top guys to the lowest of low jobber could work. You believed every match was a fight and it mattered.

Thank you for this video

“This is America and you can sue anybody for anything” classic

I remember watching SMW episodes on public access TV...in Connecticut. I can say that I got to see legends in the making before a lot of people in my area did. Thanks, Jim.

I lived in SMW's region, and the only way I even knew they existed was because I'd read about them in PWI while my mother or grandparents were shopping for groceries. When P2P's came out, I got to download some of their tv tapings and watched for the first time. Unless you're an insanely avid wrestling fan, there's really nothing you'd enjoy. Of course I was one, so it was kinda cool to see Cornette, Dutch, R&R Expresss, and a few other old WCW heads. But I put it in the same category as late-80's AWA. Just way behind the times and hard to watch at times.

SMW is where Terry Funk did his first moonsault against Bullet Bob Armstrong.

"I just want to shout out to my homeboy OJ, keep up the good work...... 2 less we gotta worry about" - New Jack, SMW 1994.

I’m a big Cornette fan and am a regular listener to both of his podcasts. I really enjoyed this video.

I lived in eastern Kentucky , and I went to many, many SMW house shows. It also aired on local TV late Saturday nights. I've been to WCW, WWF, WWE, and AEW house shows, and SMW was my favorite. I loved every show! ❤️

I'm a huge fan of Cornys wrestling history stories. That man can tell a story. He made me fans of guys i never heard of before. Wish he would do tv shows about behind the scenes stories. His podcast is pretty good too.

I like the way they played the mummy angle, the commentary was always incredibly skeptical about it and playing it off like Daryl Van Horn was a con artist despite his efforts to try and prove his mummy was real.

The affirmative action 2 count would've been awesome lol

I never knew Rick Rubin was involved with smokey mountain wrestling

Thanks for making this, my brother, and our friends are really loved SMW back in the day. We grew up in North Carolina and when we started watching wrestling, there was no Monday night wrestling show. Saturday was always the day for wrestling. About lunchtime WWF wrestling challenge would come on then WCW pro would come on, and then after that Smoky Mountain Wrestling would finish off this three hour block of wrestling from three different promotions.

And then all you had to do was go outside and ride bikes and kill some time for about three hours and then you could watch WCW Saturday Night which at that time was the main WCW show.

Back then, I didn’t understand what happened. I remember the end of 1995 pretty well even though the last shows they taped were in November 1995 they aired in December 1995.

And there was never any announcement that the show was going to end. We went out of state to our grandparents house for two weeks for the holidays and I remember that Saturday in 1996 after WCW pro went off there was no more SMW. It was replaced with USWA where I lived.

But when Covid hit, I actually watched all of the promotion from the first show to the very last show all over again and you can tell after the Super Bowl of wrestling in the summer of 1995 that Jim had already made up his mind at that point. The Super Bowl wrestling was a great show and I believe they did fit 5000 more people into the Knoxville Colosseum at the time. But it just feels like all the TVs after that Jim was just kind of going on auto pilot. He wasn’t trying to think as clever as he was before and by the time you got to September 1995 Jim was basically managing every heel in the company because it was just easier on him because he didn’t have to stay up writing stuff for everybody. He could just walk out and cut the promos he needed on the fly.

I really do wish that he could’ve seen the future because what sucks is he close the door literally six months before the wrestling Boom of the late 90s with the Monday night wars kicked off. Six months after the last SMW show Scott Hallwood walk out on WCW television, and less than a month later WCW was dominating the ratings. I felt like if Jim would’ve just held on until the end of the summer of 1996 he would’ve seen there was a reason to keep going and probably by the summer of 1997 they would be making decent profit handover fist.

You have to remember that in the late 90s television companies were looking for wrestling to put on the air versus the first half of the 90s where you weren’t going to get on the air unless you paid top dollar for it.   At this time, Indy promotions in certain parts of the country even though they only ran one city started getting TV locally in their state. They really weren’t territories. They were just independent shows that may be ran three or four different places in one state but wrestling was so popular at the time, that this kind of thing was happening. And if an independent promotion out of Massachusetts, got a TV show just for Massachusetts at this time that they were getting paid for I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to say that smoky mountain wrestling would have been fine.

I really do believe that if Jim would’ve held on through 1996 that come 2001  SMW would be the last promotion standing after WCW and ECW went away because wrestling was still red hot. It’s just WCW didn’t have anyone that knew what they were doing to their company and Paul Hayman was a terrible businessman. It’s not that there wasn’t an audience for it.

USWA/Smokey Mountain feud was so underrated. One of my favorite feuds ever in pro wrestling.

I did not discover SMW until 2009 while living outside Knoxville.  The VHS were still around.  What a great promotion!

This is super well done. I’m a casual wrestling fan. And you inform and narrate like a PBS presenter. Very enjoyable.