Jim Cornette On AEW’s Hook: ‘I F**king Love This Kid’

During last Friday’s episode of AEW Rampage, Hook, the son of Taz, made his in-ring debut by defeating Fuego Del Sol with the Tazmission, now named the Redrum.

Jim Cornette has shared his thoughts on Hook’s debut match during Jim Cornette’s Drive Thru. Here are the highlights: 

Hook’s unique style

“This hair is gonna be the most over hair in the wrestling business. I think people have called it unfortunate in the past, an unfortunate head of hair, or just weird or whatever, but the hair fits him perfectly.

“His opponent was (Fuego Del Sol), the luchador from Mobile, Alabama. So obviously they wanted somebody that’s athletic enough to do (Hook’s) s**t but at the same time small enough that (Hook) could move him around and whatever. But the spotlight was on Hook here.

“And I love this f**king kid. Before we have not seen him do enough to know whether he could do anything or not, and it kind of is the rib – ‘There’s Hook standing there doing nothing’.

“But f**k, he’s in great shape, but more importantly, he’s got attitude, the facial expressions, and the way he comes off when he’s heeling the people, and he was heelish in his demeanour. He’s got some natural things – I know Taz has been training him and he’s been training with I’m sure a bunch of different people – but he’s got s**t you can’t really teach if his personality was a bag of wet f**king lettuce. And he just carried himself really good, especially when he knew he was getting over and he knew he was doing well, he got a little extra hitch in his getalong there. He does the Judo throws, he’s smooth with it, he’s got a different kind of style than everybody else. And a lot of it is his aggression – even though he’s green, he was aggressive and he wasn’t out there scared to say boo to a goose as Adrian Street would say.

“He needs work on those crossfaces, because as he stood over the guy and started crossfacing him, I think… one or two of them missed, the reason why may have been because the other two were live rounds. But it didn’t look smooth, I don’t know, but he needs a little work on that.

How fan expectations changed ahead of Hook’s debut:

“I’m not saying this was the greatest debut in the history of pro-wrestling or it was like Ronda Rousey at WrestleMania, which obviously had more high-priced talent involved and a lot more rehearsal if you will. But I said on the show a few months ago, you never get to see anybody that when you first seem them (you’re like), ‘Oh, s**t, wow, oh!’, like you used to before everything was recorded and put on the worldwide internet. But in this case, they managed to do it, because if anything, from the way he’s just been hanging around – a couple of times a couple of months ago he got physical and threw some kicks that didn’t do him any favors – you kinda had lowered expectations. And all of a sudden, he’s far exceeding them and the people are getting into it.”

“And so it was a combination of it was a really good debut, and he’s got a lot of talent and a lot of oomph to his personality, and people were just surprised because it was better than they thought it was gonna be and better than it had a right to be probably. So I really enjoyed it.

“It’s a perfect storm – we’ll use that analogy after the events of the last week. You’ve got a kid that really is good, he’s attracted attention by the bizarre method of not really doing anything to the point where he was getting more attention than anybody who did anything because people were joking about him never doing anything, and you have the fact that not a lot of people are impressed with debuts anymore because not a ton of them are impressive.

”And so (the fans are) like, ‘Yeah give us more of this’, and that’s a good thing for him, and I hope he rides it to the moon.”

H/T to WrestleTalk for the transcription