When I look at Jim Ross, Jim Cornette and Paul Heyman; the one that generally sticks out at me as the one who is generally able to see the big picture is Jim Ross.
That's not to say that he would somehow be able to wave a magic wand and take TNA to the Promise Land. I know that Jim Ross excels at talent relations and has a great eye for talent, but he's never really been in this sort of position in which he runs the day to day operations of a pro wrestling company. So while my instincts tell me he'd do a good job, it's hard to be sure. After all, Starrcade 1989 was something of a train wreck and Jim Ross was a major creative mind behind it. It had some innovative aspects but it was something of a clusterfuck. The Iron Man singles & tag team tournaments sounded very interesting on paper but the execution of the whole thing was something of a mess.
At the same time, however, Jim Cornette & Paul Heyman have history working against them. Both men have shown their lack of business acumen in running a pro wrestling company in the past. Cornette has sometimes been accused of being too much of an old school guy, often letting his love of how things were done back in the days in which he was growing up get in the way of what makes money. Smokey Mountain Wrestling definitely had an old school feel about it and while it did have talented wrestlers on the roster, it came across, at least to me, as something of a vanity project in some ways. It seemed that Cornette cared more about his own personal vision as to what he wanted it to be rather than having it be a profitable business. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that an old school mentality is bad at all. Personally, I think more of an old school mentality could only help things in wrestling. But, I think it's important to know where to draw the line, to accept what works, what doesn't and to be willing to bend if that's what it takes. If Cornette could do that, then I think it could lead to something interesting.
In the case of Paul Heyman, everyone in wrestling today has heard of ECW. It was innovative and it was a legit alternative to WCW and WWE during the 90s. At the same time though, ECW itself was its own worst enemy. The matches were frequently packed with extreme, over the top violence packed with highly dangerous spots and blood. Wrestlers would frequently use as many four letter words in their promos as they could possibly fit in. ECW had a very sleazy kind of atmosphere that was in vogue during the late 90s, which was the era of Crash TV. That's all well and good until ECW managed to land a national TV deal with TNN, which would later become Spike. The network had ECW tone down the violence and profanity to such a degree that it simply wasn't the same company, at least not that you could see on television. To be fair, however, ECW was definitely extreme, too much so much of its general content to be aired on television in the minds of many people. There's also the fact that Heyman, while highly creative, simply was not a businessman. Or, I should say, he simply wasn't a very good one.
A while back, when Heyman was talking with Dixie Carter, the demands that Heyman made did seem pretty unreasonable. Heyman wanted unquestionable, total control of the creative direction of TNA and millions upon millions of dollars. I can't remember exactly how much, but I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. Those terms made me think that either Heyman wasn't really majorly interested, because they're just unrealistic, though he would have accepted, in my opinion, had Dixie agreed. They also made me think that Heyman may have been attempting to take advantage of Dixie as she's often been referred to as the "money mark" by some. Heyman does give me the vibe of something akin to an oily, sneaky used car salesman. After all, Heyman would never make these kinds of demands of WWE. Vince McMahon would laugh so hard in Heyman's face that he'd probably give himself a heart attack. Also, I think Heyman's abilities, as the IWC tends to do in many instances, gets jacked to a ridiculous level. As I said, ECW was innovative but the way people talk, you'd think that the man was able to shit bricks of solid gold. There's no sort of guarantee that Paul Heyman would be able to get the job done in TNA based simply on what he was able to do over a decade & a half ago. There's no guarantee that Heyman could have remade TNA into another ECW. Even if he could, I somehow doubt that the Carters would approve of such a raunchy product. Bob Carter strikes me as something of an old school, Tennessee conservative.
Between the three, I think that Jim Ross comes off as the most level headed. I'm not saying he'd be fantastic but Jim Ross is someone that inspires confidence.
