TNA World Champion Frankie Kazarian appeared on Insight With Chris Van Vliet to discuss various topics, including the initial concept for the first-ever Ultimate X Match.
Kazarian said, “They pulled us aside, us being myself, Chris Sabin and Michael Shane, and said, ‘We have this idea for a match, like a ladder match without ladders.’ So the original concept was chains going in the form of an X, and the belt is going to hang in the center, and it’s just like this new, innovative match. We’re like, okay. So they’re like, we’re going to fly you in a day early so you can see the structure and kind of get used to it, because they had never been done. So we all got flown into Nashville, and we go down The Asylum, the National Fairgrounds, and they’re still figuring out how to even build it. The original concept they had steel poles inside the ring posts. And they nixed the chain idea, and it was just cable. They finally got it to where, structurally, it looked good. It’s getting late at night now, and they’re like, ‘Alright, who wants to try it?’ I go, ‘I do, I’ll try it.’ I just jump up, grab and start shimmying. I start shimmying, and all four of the posts just go, then all of a sudden, I’m standing on the ground. So now you got a bunch of these engineers, construction guys, scratching their head like crap, and the pay-per-view is the next day. So, you know, uh oh. So they try to do something else. It doesn’t work. Now it’s like, midnight, one o’clock. So it’s like guys, we’ll figure it out. So we get there the next day. Still don’t really have it figured out. Eventually they did the lighting trusses, the four lighting trusses on the corners and that could support the weight and the cable and all that. But they didn’t have it set up until 10 minutes before doors opened. So we had all these ideas, but had no clue if we could pull them off. We did not get to practice, rehearse, nothing, all that stuff that happened was just in our head.”
On not getting a chance to climb up:
“Nothing. So we went out there on a live pay-per-view, we knew it would support our weight, and that’s all we knew. But we had these ideas, and it’s not a regular match. You have ideas. One guy’s climbing, the other guy power bombs him, or this guy spears him. Thank God I was in there with two guys that were very, very capable wrestlers, Chris Sabin and Michael Shane. But we somehow pulled it off, man. It’s become an iconic novelty match in TNA, and in wrestling really.”
On the scary moment where Christopher Daniels almost died:
“I did too, yeah. But it was [the wrestler] Suicide, so nobody cared about him. The original idea was supposed to be, again, we thought, because it was a multi-man, eight or nine guys in, in there. We thought they were going to have the lighting trusses, but they had cables. Because the idea was, if they had the lighting trusses, myself and Chris Daniels were going to fight to the top. Chris was going to eventually hook me for Angel’s Wings, and I was going to backdrop him off. But we didn’t have the truck. He’s insane, by the way. We’ve established that, obviously we couldn’t do that. So we had the idea of, why don’t we go up there and we can both sit on the cables, and where he takes me and he gives me like a flatliner, and we both go straight back. Well, we both didn’t go straight back. We both went straight down. We both landed pretty high on our head and shoulders, but I hit and I immediately didn’t know where he landed. So I’m just like, through the mask, ‘Is CD Okay, CD Okay, is CD okay?’ And they’re like, ‘Are you okay?’ I’m like, ‘I’m fine. Is CD okay?’ Like, he’s fine. He’s moving. He’s good. I’m like, okay, good, and yeah, I got in trouble with the wife on that one. I’m not allowed to do that anymore.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
