The Madison Square Garden "curtain call" incident happened at a WWE (then WWF) live event on May 19, 1996 when Shawn Michaels, Triple H, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash all broke character in the middle of the ring and hugged. Jim Cornette says if he was in charge of the company, Triple H would have been fired that same day.
The subject of the Kliq's kayfabe-breaking incident at MSG recently came up on Cornette's
Corny's Drive-Thru podcast on MLW Radio, and Cornette says he would have handled the incident a bit differently than Vince McMahon did.
With Kevin Nash and Scott Hall leaving the company for WCW immediately after the incident, he would have had to deal with Triple H and Shawn Michaels. Cornette says he would have dealt with the lowest wrestler on the card first. Back in May '96, this was current WWE executive and now Vince McMahon's son-in-law Triple H.
“Yeah, I would have fired [Triple H], because he was a(n) … underneath mid card guy at best, that wasn’t necessarily really getting over at that f*****g point like gangbusters. And why the f**k that he would think that he had the status in the community just because he hung around with these guys and rode in a car with them and liked him being around because that way they could preserve their pecking order … There’s a hundred – a thousand other wrestlers who would love to be in Madison Square Garden tonight. And you think that you’re a special motherf****er after being here only a year or 18 months that you can go out … and expose the business?”
In regards to Shawn Michaels, Cornette said he would have booked him to lose the world championship title and put over other wrestlers, before eventually getting rid of him.
“I would have said, ‘Okay, his two f**king friends are gone to WCW and they’re going to have some influence because they’ve got these big money contracts.’ They’re going to be pitching him so they can all be together. … My champion—his loyalty is going to be suspect because he’s never proven to be loyal anyway … So while I’ve got him under contract right now, I need to figure out who is going to carry the belt in his place, I need to systematically get that guy over and get him ready to take it off [Michaels] and then I need to start beating the f**k out of this guy to get some other people over on his way out and then get rid of that f**king mental case, too, and then I’ll have much more peace and quiet in my f*****g locker room.”
