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Profile: Jeff Jarrett
Currently known as a primary TNA figure both on and off the screen, third generation wrestler Jeff Jarrett has a long history in the business from a young age, through high profile periods in WWE and WCW, to his ship steering position today.
After debuting at the age of 19 for his father's Tennessee- and Kentucky-based promotion, Jeff went on to enjoy ten reigns as USWA Heavyweight Champion and fifteen with the USWA Tag Team Titles, with multiple partners including Jerry Lawler and Brian Christopher.
In 1993, Jarrett debuted for the World Wrestling Federation with the gimmick of a heel country singer who saw the WWF as a stepping stone towards musical stardom. For most of the next three years Double J was a strong midcarder, winning the Intercontinental Title three times. During a notable feud with Razor Ramon for the gold, Jeff enlisted the devious services of The Roadie, and produced a video of himself singing "With My Baby Tonight" (a song he performed "live" at the second In Your House pay-per-view). When Jarrett left the Federation in 1996 over a contract dispute, The Roadie - later to be known as Road Dogg or BG James - revealed that his former on-screen boss had been lip-synching, and "With My Baby Tonight" had been sung by The Roadie himself.
Upon debuting for World Championship Wrestling that year, Jarrett was courted by rivalling factions the Four Horsemen and the New World Order, choosing to join the Horsemen as a babyface. The following June he defeated Dean Malenko for his first United States Title, and shortly afterwards left the stable to feud with Horsemen member Steve McMichael. Jarrett hired Mongo's wife Debra as his manager, but lost the US Title to the former football player in August.
In October, he left WCW and returned to the WWF, where in early 1998 he joined Jim Cornette in leading an "invasion" by the National Wrestling Alliance. Winning the NWA North American Title on an episode of Raw, Jarrett was assisted by former champion Barry Windham and NWA World Tag Team Champions the New Midnight Express (Bombastic Bob Holly and Bodacious Bart Gunn) in imposing a heel interpretation of wrestling tradition on the Attitude-era WWF. When he left the group in March, he was stripped of the North American Title by Cornette who awarded it back to Windham.
With the tepid NWA angle behind him, Jeff briefly brought in Tennessee Lee (former USWA tag team partner Robert Fuller) as his manager alongside Southern Justice (formerly the Godwinns) as bodyguards, and the active trio feuded with babyface faction D-Generation X. At SummerSlam '98, Jarrett lost a hair-versus-hair match to X-Pac, forcing him to finally abandon his long hair style at the hands of DX and ring announcer Howard Finkel, whose hair Jeff had shaven leading up to the match. After losing to DX in a six-man tag at In Your House: Breakdown, Jarrett and Southern Justice parted ways.
The following January, Jeff - reunited with Debra McMichael as his manager - teamed with Owen Hart to win his first WWF Tag Team Championship (now the WWE World Tag Team Titles). After his partner in crime suffered a fatal accident in May, Jarrett returned to singles competition and won the Intercontinental Title twice more during the year along with the European Title, holding both championships at the same time after beating D'Lo Brown at SummerSlam.
Later in the year, while feuding with Chyna over the Intercontinental gold, Jarrett earned a reputation for attacking women, often hitting them with one of his trademark guitars, and separated from Debra and the assistant he'd presented to her, Miss Kitty. While booked to defend the title against Chyna in a Good Housekeeping match (a hardcore match with household items for weapons), Jarrett's contract was meanwhile allowed to expire a day before the pay-per-view, due to an oversight by Head of Talent Relations Jim Ross. With Jeff's friend Vince Russo leaving the WWF a week earlier to become head writer for WCW, Jarrett handed in his resignation, and demanded all outstanding bonuses be paid to him immediately in return for wrestling at No Mercy to drop the title.
Days later, Jeff returned to WCW under Russo's watch, proclaiming himself the Chosen One. At Starrcade '99 he failed to defeat United States Champion Chris Benoit in a ladder match, but captured the title 24 hours later on Monday Nitro. Later that night, Jarrett formed a new version of the New World Order, along with Bret Hart and founding members of the original group, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. After losing and regaining the US Title during an on-screen power struggle between Nash and Terry Funk, Jarrett added the Harris Brothers to the stable, and later usurped Nash for the role of WCW Commissioner. The group quietly disbanded however following Hart's retirement.
When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff returned from their respective hiatuses to lead WCW together, all titles were vacated, including Jarrett's US Championship. However, as a member of the New Blood, he defeated Millionnaires Club member Diamond Dallas Page at Spring Stampede 2000 for his first WCW World Heavyweight Title. After losing the gold back to Page the same month, and participating in a tag team match that saw Page's partner David Arquette become champion (due to a stipulation awarding the belt to whoever scored the fall), Jarrett regained the title in a triple-tier cage match at Slamboree, thanks to actor Arquette turning on his former partner and setting up Jeff for the win.
In June of that year, Jarrett partook in a controversial scenario involving Hulk Hogan and Vince Russo. At Bash At The Beach. Stories vary on what actually happened, but what viewers saw at the pay-per-view was Jarrett voluntarily laying down in the ring, with Russo on the outside telling Hulk to cover him and take the belt. An apparently bemused Hogan, claiming that things like this were the reason the company was going down the toilet, reluctantly put his foot on Jarrett's compliant chest while the referee counted to three, and left with the gold. Later in the night, with Hogan having left the building, Russo returned to the ring and verbally berated the veteran, breaking kayfabe by claiming the Hulkster had invoked a creative control clause in his contract, demanding that he win the title that night. Russo went on to promise that Hogan would never be seen in WCW again, and declared that a new official WCW Champion would be crowned later in the night in a match between Jarrett and Booker T. Jeff lost the seemingly impromptu match, and went on to briefly feud with Booker over the title.
By the time WCW was purchased by the WWF in March 2001, Jarrett had aligned himself with heel faction the Magnificent Seven, led by Ric Flair, and was feuding alongside Flair with Dusty and Dustin Rhodes. After the purchase, Jeff worked tours and one-off supershows with the World Wrestling All-Stars promotion in Europe and Australia, where he defeated Road Dogg (his former Roadie) to become WWA Champion. When the promotion closed in 2003, having had several other champions in the interim, Jarrett unified the title with his NWA World Heavyweight Championship.
In the meantime, Jeff and his father Jerry Jarrett set up their own promotion, initially operating under the National Wrestling Alliance banner. NWA Total Nonstop Action, as it was called, ran weekly pay-per-views and hired control of the NWA's World Heavyweight Title and World Tag Team Titles. Trusting himself more than others to be around for the long haul and to provide sufficient name value to attract new fans, Jeff took a prominent role on the shows, booking himself as NWA World Champion for many and relatively long periods of time, first winning the title from Ron Killings in November.
Feuding as a babyface with old friend Vince Russo, Jarrett led the charge for tradition against heel faction Sports Entertainment Extreme until the stable disbanded in February 2003. He would later go on to reprise the role of top heel as TNA abandoned the weekly pay-per-view concept in favor of a national TV deal, and for a time led his own stable named Planet Jarrett.
When Sting returned to TNA in 2006, he made it crystal clear that he intended to rid the promotion of Jeff Jarrett, with whom he had feuded briefly in WCW as well as the pre-Impact era of TNA. At Bound For Glory that October, he succeeded, defeating Jarrett for the NWA World Title and sending him off television for several months. During this time away from the ring Jeff attended to family issues, and returned as a babyface for Lockdown 2007 where he joined Kurt Angle's Lethal Lockdown team alongside former enemies Sting and Samoa Joe.
With TNA now an entirely separate entity from the NWA, and a subsidence in the backlash against his overexposure on the shows, Jeff Jarrett is in a position to steer TNA into its next phase of growth, with intentions to one day compete with the company that he left on bad terms.
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