WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett, who currently serves as the Director of Business Development for All Elite Wrestling (AEW), recently discussed various topics on an episode of his podcast, “My World With Jeff Jarrett.”
One of the topics he covered was a rumor from WrestleZone in 2014, which stated that Spike TV was interested in purchasing a 10% equity share in TNA Wrestling.
Jarrett said, “If it would have been a real offer, I can almost assure you [they would entertain in]. But the problem gets down to, ‘Hey, we want to own it, but who’s going to run it?’ They were well aware of 2011, ’12, ’13 — or maybe not ’11, but ’12, ’13, results. So I think there were discussions. But Kevin Kay and crew, I think, were under almost the exact same mindset… ‘If we’re going to get in bed together, we can’t operate the way we’re operating right now.’ So that’s that, and I don’t — unless Bob Carter really held a card close to his vest? It never got to his desk, and that’s the one that mattered. So maybe there was a coffee talk on Eric and Dixie, and maybe a brief conversation. But nothing ever materialized. And I know very much so after the fact, there was no interest in operating. I mean, the results were, they canceled the deal. They weren’t interested in doing business in the way they had been doing business from a creative direction, I’m positive of that. So, no.”
On Kevin Kay’s stance:
“I do think if Kevin would have come with a real offer. But he said it then, he said it multiple times after. They’re not in the wrestling business. But they do feel they probably should have held on to UFC under certain circumstances. And I think FOX feels the same way, that they had an opportunity and probably should have tried to figure out a much longer deal. But those networks — you know, 15 years ago or even further than that. They weren’t in — the model wasn’t there for them to own part of it. Now it’s — to me, it’s completely flipped. So you know, Bellator, we kind of saw how that ran its course. It wasn’t a successful venture. So you got to have people at the helm. You got to have, I’ll call it wrestling people running a wrestling company. And that was never in the cards in Kevin and Viacom’s eyes.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
