“However, my dad had passed away in 1968, and she didn’t want to go downtown at night alone with a little boy. “The Louisville Gardens was running every Tuesday night,” recalled Cornette. After making a deal with his mother, she accompanied him to his first ever wrestling event. His mother would also purchase a variety of wrestling magazines for her son such as The Wrestler and Inside Wrestling.
If I went to my uncle’s house in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, I could see the Crocketts’ show from North Carolina and Southeastern Wrestling from Knoxville.” If I went to my aunt’s house in Cincinnati, I could see The Sheik’s TV show from Detroit. It was a studio show, so it was different, but I liked everything related to wrestling from that point on - even on family vacations. The Jarretts’ TV show was on the air here in Louisville so I started watching. Christine Jarrett had just opened up the Louisville territory in June of 1970. Professional wrestling was love at first sight for young Jimmy, and the love affair only intensified as time went on. She said ‘well maybe I’ll let you stay up next week so you can see it.’ I bugged her enough so I could watch it, and I loved it.”
‘Jimmy, I saw wrestling on TV that looked like what I used to watch 20 years ago when I first moved to Louisville.’ I said I would like to see that. “Bruiser and Crusher were in the business in the early ’50s for goodness sake! She happened to make a comment to me the next day. “For all intents and purposes, it could have been the same kind of wrestling she saw when she moved to Louisville,” continued Cornette. Anyway, she started watching the show, and it had Bruiser and The Crusher on it. I was reading comic books - that was my first love. There was wrestling on the air in Louisville at the time, but I didn’t know it. It used to show Dick The Bruiser’s wrestling program. Once channel three in Louisville went off the air that night, she turned the channel and discovered she could get a decent signal from Bloomington, Indiana, which was the Indianapolis market. “I was around nine years old, and my mom happened to be sick one weekend. “My mother is the reason I ever saw my first wrestling match,” explained Jim Cornette to SLAM! Wrestling. She moved to Louisville in the early ’50s and worked as a secretary at the Louisville Chamber of Commerce where she met her husband who was an executive at the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times. While some mothers may frown upon their children becoming involved in the world of professional wrestling, Thelma “Mama” Cornette was the driving force behind her son entering the business.īorn on October 21, 1933, in the small town of Duckrun, Kentucky, she was the first in her family to graduate high school.
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