Jimmy Jacobs Details What Happened The Day He Was Fired By WWE
Former WWE producer Jimmy Jacobs was fired for taking a photo. It sounds blunt and simple because it is. Jacobs posed for a photo with The Young Bucks, Hangman Page, and Marty Scurll during a Bullet Club invasion of the parking lot of Citizen's Business Arena in Ontario, CA, where WWE was broadcasting an episode of "WWE Raw."
"I knew it wasn't gonna be received well, that's for sure," Jacobs told Conrad Thompson on "The Insiders" podcast. "I was in the arena and I think Kevin Owens texted me, 'Hey are The Bucks there? Are they there?' And I hadn't heard anything about it from inside the arena. He goes 'Yeah, I think they're outside. I think they're shooting something.' So I went out there, and it's like 'Holy crap, The Bucks are here,' and I just saw them, we exchanged pleasantries, and just as I was getting ready to leave I said 'Hey guys, let's take a picture,' and I took a picture, never intending to post it."
Jacobs said the photo stuck itself in his mind while he was backstage. "I was in gorilla position during segment 3 or 4 and I just go 'screw it' and I just post it. I knew there was a chance people wouldn't like it. I didn't care. I look back at it and I really see it almost like a child acting out. 'I want to get in trouble.'"
Jacobs explained that he wanted the same treatment that is supposedly given WWE Hall of Famer Michael Hayes backstage, "but I'm not Michael Hayes, so I don't get it."
According to Jacobs, this means he wanted his work to speak for itself. "I wanted to get in trouble and them be like 'well he's good at his job, so let's keep him around.' I wanted to just expand my wings. I wanted to go [exasperated sigh] 'let me just be how I am, however weird that is,' so I took the picture."
'This is it, this is the day I'm getting fired from WWE.'
It was a matter of minutes before Jacobs's photo came to the attention of various WWE officials.
"25 minutes later, Michael Hayes, Road Dogg, Dave Kapoor (fka Ranjin Singh) come to the room," Jacobs explained, "they kick everybody else out. Dave's like 'why am I seeing this?' I'm like 'yeah well I wasn't thinking.' Hunter's pissed about it."
Jacobs says that he went to Paul "Triple H" Levesque's office, where the now-WWE Chief Content Officer was "cool" about the situation, though also stern. "He wasn't happy about it but he was cool about it. Hunter's a reasonable guy. Hunter's a smart guy too. It was Hunter's vision that saw independent wrestlers could be successful and really started to target them. Hunter's a smart guy and he's a reasonable guy but he was upset about this. So I talked to him, he seemed fine with it."
Jacobs says that he then continued traveling to WWE tv broadcasts, and didn't end up back at the main WWE office until a week and a half after the photo. "I remember going 'if I make it through today I'll be fine,'" Jacobs confessed. "Then first thing in the morning, an administrative assistant comes to me and is like 'yeah, can you come meet Dave in HR office.' I remember being by the elevator and thinking 'this is it, this is the day I'm getting fired from WWE.' Like what a day! 'What an exciting, noteworthy day today is.' Not every day is like that. So yeah, they fired me. It was mostly a relief."
Jacobs says that the relief came from the freedom that came with his release. "I didn't have to think about how I was gonna leave ever, and feel trapped there. All that sort of stuff."
Looking back on the incident, Jacobs believed he was acting out so that he no longer had to 'feel confined' like he was during his tenure in WWE.