WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett recently spoke on his podcast, “My World with Jeff Jarrett,” about a variety of professional wrestling topics including if he’s surprised IMPACT Wrestling changed their name back to TNA:
“I mean, on this topic alone, you know, I could go down so many rabbit holes and so many avenues. I had heard rumblings and you know, boy do you really want to open up this can of worms? Yes, I’m surprised in a few different ways in that the conversations that I had with Anthem, I’ll just leave it at that, all the way at the highest levels and all those is that I was pretty clear with them that, ‘Hey guys, in my opinion, IMPACT Wrestling, naming that the company, was almost dead on arrival in 2011 and ‘12, the tagline, ‘Wrestling matters’, and all that kind of stuff, but I said, ‘I just think IMPACT Wrestling is dead’, the television show, and so not to, you know, go on and on and on about it, but I had those conversations in depth and gave them the history, but they are well aware of it. They bought the show IMPACT from day one, Anthem did. They knew that it was TNA Wrestling presents Impact.”
“So going down that road and knowing, okay, not a big fan of it and that’s where in my mind, hey, if you don’t like Global Force Wrestling, I even said that. Hey, we can figure out some kind of way and use the storyline and go back to TNA. There’s a lot of equity. Your library is named that. The international partners have always, there are many, many places, India specifically, Australia in a lot of ways, they never, ever quit calling it TNA wrestling. The double entendre isn’t nearly as prevalent outside of the U.S. in so many markets.”
“So all the, I guess you could say information in my head, that’s why I was like, okay, so now five years, six years after you acquired you’re rebranding? So that would be a little bit of a surprise to me, but then at the end of the day, it’s all execution. That is what I’m most optimistic about is that, okay, Scott, what’s your vision of TNA? I know what mine was. We can talk about all the different things, the four different divisions, how’s that gonna be positioned or promoted? The six-sided ring. To me, there’s a lot of nuances, but at the end of the day, it’s the story and I was blessed with fantastic talent, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe. We go through all that list, but I’m excited because it’s good for the industry. Change is good.”
“I haven’t dove too deep online with what online feedback is, but change is good but I’m sure it’s a lightning rod. I would think some people hate it, some people love it, but I do think change is good. One thing that I immediately thought was, have they been doing a storyline to bring it along that there is a group of IMPACT? I don’t know and to my knowledge, they haven’t. I think back to who would have ever thought WCCW, the Von Erich name tried and true and drew lots and lots of money through the years and just so many, but with the no shows and the way the business was turned upside down there, who would have ever thought that USWA would have been the babyface name and WCCW would have been the heel name, but that’s kind of the storyline that we went down.”
“I think you could have done a hell of a storyline out of this and really got the current watchers of AXS or IMPACT wrestling, because you know, you got to do social media changes. The rebranding, boy oh boy, it’s so much easier said than done. I’m optimistic and it sounds like they got until January to kind of complete the thing. I just hope if they haven’t, that they kind of get into a storyline to bring the people along because I think it’s a real authentic story and people can be brought along in the story with it. Karen said, ‘What are your thoughts?’ I said, ‘Well, for me to sit here and say that I’m not emotionally tied to that, when you put your own money up and see it go from a dream to a reality, I will forever be somewhat emotionally tied to it, but I wish Scott and the team nothing but the best and I hope they take it to heights that it’s never been before.'”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
