WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett, who is also All Elite Wrestling’s Director of Business Development, took to an episode of his “My World with Jeff Jarrett” podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including whether TNA’s product began to feel stale in 2008.
Jarrett said, “And the short answer is no, I did not think so. You know, I think. Look and we would have corporate guests. Wrestling fans from all over the world. You can’t take got to take everything with a grain of salt. But just every TV taping you would, I would talk to a number of weather and some park guests, some hardcore wrestling fans, some corporate suits, whatever it may be. And they would always step in and go, damn, this studio is a lot smaller than it is on TV. On TV, this and that. So there were all kinds of different comments. But I’ve always been of the mindset that. You just creatively drive everything. It’s like it just got to look in the mirror and it drives it. It drives everything and this and look, we had several kinds of through the years, but. Going into this pay-per-view, We felt I can’t say we checked all the boxes, but we had a strong card, not just on paper. We thought they were bought into Joe and Sting and Jeff and Kurt and Mick Foley, special enforcer, and we have an X Division kind of craziness with the Thunderdome and we have a cool tag match and a little bit of a celebrity flair to it if you’re a football fan. A Hall of Famer should be a Hall of Famer. But, legendary Chicago Bears, Steve Mongo McMichael, we had a big field card and this is, maybe for another time or maybe not this podcast, but when you kind of get those numbers in. There was always that ebb and flow. And I just think it’s so. It’s so easy for me to see in my eyes, and I’m sure I may be a little history revisionist. But when you look at Vince Russo in the room and Dutch Mantell in the room, Dutch would always lean too. We gotta make these pay-per-views create revenue. Ratings are a fixed income, you know, whatever. We gotta make these events innately and rightly so. Would always learn much more heavily about episodic TV shows. We have to get the ratings as high as they can, but because in Vince’s mindset, the higher the rating, the more the buys. I think as time has gone on and look again, this is, oh eight, social media was big time in its infancy. It’s a whole different ball game, I think, now today. It was this simple. Conrad, a head-scratcher in that, are we really cannibalizing ourselves like the monthly pay per views? We are asking them to pay 30 bucks a month. So, how do we get them enticed? And, oh yeah, WWE is doing the exact same thing. And yep, maybe they are not in a studio, and maybe they have seen 20 other stars and publicly traded and whatever, whatever else we want to say about it. But it was a disappointing buy rate that was simple when we got the numbers in because we just felt oh six staying retired versus Jeff’s title. Kurt had just come on the scene a couple of weeks before that. I know there was a loaded-up car, too, but we just felt now here we are two years later. This is a bigger card. This is in Chicago. The brand will give you two more years of awareness under our belt. We just felt, man, this will do more than we did. It’s going to be up. Let me just use that phrase: is it going to be up? And when you say that in the room, we’re not discussing the previous month. We’re talking about the Bound for Glory before this. And it wasn’t. We’ve got. I loved it.”
Jarrett also talked about how he loved TNA’s Steel Asylum Match.
Jarrett said, “I loved it. It’s different. You didn’t see it on if you’re a longtime fan. The NWA didn’t have this. They had WarGames. You didn’t see WWF, the Blue Steel Cage, you didn’t see WCW have it, all the different iterations. I loved it. And watching it, I always try to be very, very careful about, Oh, that’s real. Well, it’s authentic. You damn sure better be athletic to be able to climb out of that cage, or you weren’t getting out. You know, it was true there’s a component of, of a big component of realism that you got to have strength, you got to have stamina, you got to have dexterity, and you got to be ready to go after you’ve taken 15 bumps. You know, those guys that that this match and I’m going to say this a couple of times, go out of your way, but this was a good one. The steel asylum. I think it’s a unique concept. And I think this is a concept that can be overdone. But in this setting, it was a hell of a way to crank things going.”
You can check out Jarrett’s complete podcast in the video below.
