Jeff Jarrett Explains Why He Refused To Put Over Scott Steiner At A WWA PPV Event

Jeff Jarrett and Scott Steiner refused to put each other over.

On a recent episode of his My World podcast, spoke about the now-defunct World Wrestling All-Stars and its owner, Andrew McManus. At the promotion’s second PPV event, The Revolution, Randy Savage was scheduled to be in the main event but backed out at the last minute. Supposedly, Scott Steiner was the proposed replacement opponent for Jarrett, but it was rumored that Jeff refused to lose to Steiner. Jarrett confirmed that to be true and added the following:

“So, yes, that it is true, and he was definitely refusing to do one for me. There was a definite stalemate because I’m going back to Andrew, who went through this Savage deal and look, I’ll give you a mulligan on that. I kind of told you that wasn’t going to pan out, but whatever. Going through this, I’m telling you, get you a crew and stick with it. If you honestly believe Steiner is going to be with you, great. I don’t buy it. So, at this point, Andrew, we really got some decisions to make. Am I on the team or off the team? That was a very succinct conversation. [Andrew said] ‘Oh, we’ll worry about it after Vegas.’ Well, Andrew, that isn’t really how this industry works. You want to worry about it after Vegas? I get that as a promoter he had so many headaches, he had so many balls in the air, it became overwhelming. He got in over his head from a political point of view. He learned his quick lesson with Savage. He learned his quick lessons with other talents. I think he really thought more than anybody he was going to have [Rey] Mysterio.

Again, he was on the job training, if you will, dealing with talent and we were coming to this fork in the road and Andrew, I’ve sort of told you this from day one, ‘Get your touring all-stars together and go with them.’ Because winners and losers. Again, growing up in the promotion, you show up to work, half your locker room is not happy, in essence. It’s evolved over time, certainly, but half of your locker room doesn’t get their hand raised and would probably prefer to get their hand raised. Not that they’re not going to do it, not that they’re refusing to do it, but they would prefer to further their careers. So now here we are, 9, 10, 11 months after the close of WCW and it’s the wild wild west of the independent scene if you will, so doing jobs and favors and business and all that, the roads were beginning to, okay, what is the next step? I go back to what I told Andrew prior to the Savage, that whole deal, ‘Who’s on the team and who’s off?’ When he said, ‘Oh, we need to put Steiner over.’ And I’m sure Scott, in Scott’s so diplomatic way, told Andrew, ‘I ain’t getting beat, I don’t care who’s in the ring with me.’ Okay, you’re going to wrestle Jeff. Jeff will put you over. They probably came to me and I went, ‘No, that ain’t going to work.'”

Jarrett would eventually defend his Championship in the main event against Brian Christopher. The company wouldn’t last much longer, too, closing down in May 2003.

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