Jim Ross Critiques WWE's Past Handling of Don Callis and The Jackyl

On a recent episode of his Grilling JR podcast, Jim Ross delved into a variety of subjects. Within the podcast dialogue, Ross expressed his perspective on WWE's handling of Don Callis back in 1997. During that time, Callis served as the manager for the brief-lived faction The Truth Commission, adopting the moniker of The Jackyl. Ross voiced his opinion that WWE's treatment of Callis during this period was not up to par.

"Bad timing more than anything. If it had worked, it would not have been bad creative. But look at who he was managing. I did some commentary with him on some shows and realized right away he’s a hell of a talker… I thought that would be his calling as a broadcaster, not as a manager. Not that he couldn’t be a manager and not that he couldn’t do a good job, just the fact that when you stumble across a guy that could really talk, is a good listener, and has the ability to talk in sound bytes so he’s not on and on and on, you’re lucky. That’s how I looked at Don. Like I said, he was a good listener and he wanted to do well. We didn’t do a good job then, in my opinion, of maximizing the minutes for Don Callis. It was a mistake on how he was handled there. That might have been partially Don’s situation. Don had a lot of self-confidence. He had been around long enough to know all the good brothers and the bad brothers. I don’t know if that did him any favors, but nonetheless, talented dude and we kind of blew it with him in that era, I thought."