Billy Corgan recently appeared as a guest on the “INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet” podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, the NWA President spoke about the culture of pro wrestling on TV, as well as working with Dixie Carter in IMPACT Wrestling in the past.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On the culture of professional wrestling on television: “Yeah, I think everybody knows that you know, again, you have a smart audience, you know, when you run live event stuff, that’s a lot more expensive than say putting stuff on TV. So you know, just like, look at the respect that you must give something like Raw that’s which is run, how many years. It’s like running a live show on time, delivering, you know, main events and stuff that really matters. Keep an audience coming back. I mean, that is quite an accomplishment. You look at the infrastructure and stuff like that. So when you look at why an Endeavour would pay $9 billion for WWE, one person would sit there who doesn’t understand say, well, you’re just buying wrestlers and a ring. No, you’re buying a whole culture that knows how to make that work, week after week after week, in their case, multiple times a week.”
On working with Dixie Carter in TNA: “There are moments of frustration where I wish I’d gotten the TV deal, but seemed like it was there and then you realise it’s a little bit of what I went through with the band. The minute you jump into deeper water now you’re subservient to a greater set of forces which are beyond your control, put simply to the camera, the minute you take somebody else’s money. Now you’re in a different negotiation. And they start you know, I remember, just tell a quick funny story. I remember being in a TNA and there was some grousing about Kurt Angle being the champion, which seems strange to me because Kurt Angle was one of the all-time greats and always a great person to do business with behind the scenes. Nothing respect for Kurt. So I was like, why are people complaining? Oh, well, you know, somebody pulls you aside, well, we are on Destination America, Destination America told Dixie Carter, you need someone as a champion who represents America. So Dixie just switched the belts. But the thing was, it was the grousing in the company was it was because it wasn’t a wrestling decision based on setting up wrestling characters. It was like the network who’s paying us all this money, told us so we’re going to do what the network said.”
Check out the complete interview via the YouTube player embedded below.
