The second-largest professional wrestling promotion in the United States runs out of a 400,000-square-foot glowing red-brick building in Nashville’s SoBro neighborhood, not far from the Country Music Hall of Fame. With rented space in the basement and on the third floor, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling is one of more than 140 businesses based in Cummins Station, and when I meet Dixie Carter, the embattled 49-year-old president, she receives me in a corner office covered wall to wall with mementos and tchotchkes. “If you hear me holler, come running,” she tells the TNA rep exiting the room. Carter made the same crack when I interviewed her in New York City.
“This is one of my favorite things,” she says, walking toward a psychedelic painting. “When we had our first issues with Jeff Hardy,” the TNA daredevil who has struggled with drug and alcohol abuse throughout his career, “he did this painting called The Charismatic Apology.” She shows off autographed baseballs from TNA fans David Eckstein and David Dellucci, an Ole Miss alum like Carter. There’s also a life-size cardboard cutout of John Wayne, a gift from her dad, and a Frank Wycheck bobblehead. “He’s a buddy of mine,” Carter beams. “Remember the Music City Miracle?”
Dixie Carter is charming — a neighborly kind of person — and nearly 5-foot-9 in her chunky Michael Kors heels. Bracelet upon jangling bracelet circle her wrist, and she has maybe the largest diamond ring I’ve ever seen up close. “That is a Texas thing,” she says of her bangles. Her voice, a soft Dallas lilt, has its own smile even when touching on layoffs that TNA doled out just one week before my visit. “We were overstaffed in certain cases,” Carter says. “Certain times you have to take a step back to take a massive step forward.”
The recent downsizing was the latest step back for TNA, the well-funded, talent-stacked wrestling promotion whose goal since its inception in 2002 was to be the alternative to and perhaps even competition for Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment. But while Carter claims the company is profitable,1 she acknowledges TNA’s annus horribilis. Live events are down. Ratings have eroded — 2013 was the first year since 2006 that Impact Wrestling, TNA’s two-hour flagship program on Spike TV, averaged below a 1.0 rating, less than one-third of what WWE’s Raw pulls in on Monday nights. Main-event talent such as Sting and AJ Styles are gone, as are respected stalwarts Chris Sabin, Christopher Daniels, and Kazarian. Even the creative team has thinned: In the past 14 months, Bruce Prichard, Eric Bischoff, Hulk Hogan, and Vince Russo — men with historically successful track records who were responsible for the majority of the promotion’s story lines — have exited.
The most alarming departure was the December 2013 resignation of TNA cofounder, minority owner, and part-time wrestler Jeff Jarrett. “The time was right,” he tells me about ending his sometimes fraught, decadelong association with Carter. “I wanted to move on to another chapter of my life.” And once he left TNA, Jeff Jarrett, third-generation wrestling promoter, did the one thing Jeff Jarrett knows how to do: He started another wrestling promotion.
News of TNA’s troubles, already well known within the Internet wrestling community, went public on July 27 when TMZ reported that Spike TV would not renew Impact; the current deal, which ran to October, was recently extended through the end of the year. “TMZ asked me, ‘Hey, is this story real, should we run with it?” Carter says as she settles into a couch. “I was watching a movie and didn’t see it until some little wrestling site ran it. Then I gave TMZ a quote, which said we’re still negotiating. That never made it to print.”
Despite being the network’s highest-rated program, Impact Wrestlingreportedly was too expensive for Spike to offset the minimal advertising revenue. Spike is also rumored to be expanding its target demo beyond males ages 18 to 34. A network rep wouldn’t comment, citing ongoing negotiations, but added, “The relationship has always been tremendous and collaborative with Dixie and her team.”
TNA losing its television deal is the latest harsh reality the professional wrestling industry is facing. Even WWE, which dominates the marketplace, is struggling. In 2000, Raw averaged a 5.88 rating and the company’s pay-per-view buy rate hovered around 517,000. Last year, Raw scored a 3.01 and, despite more than a million buys for WrestleMania, pay-per-views were down to 330,000. And the WWE Network’s low subscriber number spooked Wall Street in May, sending the company’s stock tumbling to $11.27 a share from a March high of $31.98. (At press time, the stock sits at $15.01.) The numbers don’t lie: Professional wrestling went into a deep recession following its late-’90s boom and has now settled into a decadelong malaise. The battle between WWE and Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling drove the business to its zenith. Now there might not even be room for a no. 2.
Still, Carter sees this moment — a time when her company is losing its television deal and her entire industry is slumping — as an opportunity. At least that’s the spin. Since debuting on Spike, Impact Wrestling has occupied four time slots over four different evenings, including last month’s eleventh hour move to Wednesday — there wasn’t even time to change the “tune in next Thursday” sign-off. She craves stability in addition to more hours and more programming. “We will die a slow death on the vine if we just stay as one two-hour show in the U.S.,” she says. “I have big decisions to make. I want this to be a big play. I don’t want this to be a status quo play.”
Soon after the TMZ story broke, executive VP of talent relations and creative John Gaburick sent TNA talent a two-paragraph email updating them on the television situation. Morale in the locker room was surprisingly strong, although by now the wrestlers have developed a thick skin. “I’ve [worked] 95 percent of the shows this company has run, and from day one the Internet, the public, has tried to bash TNA,” says the wrestler Bobby Roode. “We’ve been here for 12 years and after all the negativity and all the bullshyt — ‘They’re going down, they’re going under, they’re done’ — we’re still here.”
Carter delivered a similar pep talk before an early-August TV taping at theManhattan Center. “I may have let a cuss word or two slip,” she says, sounding like a teetotaler who’s just snuck a taste of rum raisin ice cream. “A couple of guys came up to me afterward and said, ‘We believe in you. We believe in this company.’”
TNA suffers from the curse of being no. 2. It is little brother, forever obscured by the Master of the Universe. It is the Jets, the Mets, the Clippers. And bad things happen to TNA. The company has been victimized by rotten luck. But by and large, poor decision-making and mismanagement are at the heart of TNA’s woes.
The latest TNA scandal, which might be the most TNA scandal yet, was seeded last October when Carter rehired Russo, a writer who worked with the company from 2002 to 2004 and then 2006 to 2012, to consult on the creative team. There was a hitch: Russo had to keep his new job a secret. A former video store owner from Long Island, Russo is one of the most controversial men in wrestling history. He’s abrasive, a disruptor with a reputation for not playing well with others, and is partly responsible for removing the “wrestling” from professional wrestling, much to the dismay of traditionalists.
“The Internet wrestling community thinks in-ring wrestling action should take up every minute of every show,” Russo says, practically shouting. “That’s what they believe the business is. That’s what they are fans of. I mean, they rate fake wrestling matches on a star system. The matches are fake! They are not real!”
As a writer, Russo places an emphasis on soap-opera story lines, long promos, backstage vignettes, and TV-14 edginess over in-ring action. Russo has his vocal detractors. “He’s a cancer,” says Jim Cornette, the longtime wrestling manager, promoter, and writer who worked alongside him in WWE and TNA. But Russo also presided over the early days of WWE’s Attitude Era, the biggest growth period in the billion-dollar company’s history.2 He failed miserably when he tried duplicating the formula in the now defunct WCW.
But why the secrecy? A July report stating that Russo’s hiring was clandestine because Spike TV did not want to work with him has been debunked. “Vince Russo never meant anything to Spike TV,” said David Schwarz, senior VP of communications with Spike, in a recent statement. “He had nothing to do with negotiations. Nobody cares about Vince Russo at Spike TV.” Russo, who says that Spike knew of his employment since January, has a different theory. “It’s because Dixie was afraid of what the Internet was going to say,” he says. “She puts heavy stock into the Internet wrestling community and all of the dirt sheets from day one. She’s obsessed with reading them, reading what they say about the show and what they say about her. She didn’t want the backlash of hiring Vince Russo, who the Internet hates.”
I couldn't post the entire article because it exceeded the word count for a post. Read rest of the article here: http://grantland.com/features/tna-professional-wrestling-dixie-carter-jeff-jarrett-wwe/
“This is one of my favorite things,” she says, walking toward a psychedelic painting. “When we had our first issues with Jeff Hardy,” the TNA daredevil who has struggled with drug and alcohol abuse throughout his career, “he did this painting called The Charismatic Apology.” She shows off autographed baseballs from TNA fans David Eckstein and David Dellucci, an Ole Miss alum like Carter. There’s also a life-size cardboard cutout of John Wayne, a gift from her dad, and a Frank Wycheck bobblehead. “He’s a buddy of mine,” Carter beams. “Remember the Music City Miracle?”
Dixie Carter is charming — a neighborly kind of person — and nearly 5-foot-9 in her chunky Michael Kors heels. Bracelet upon jangling bracelet circle her wrist, and she has maybe the largest diamond ring I’ve ever seen up close. “That is a Texas thing,” she says of her bangles. Her voice, a soft Dallas lilt, has its own smile even when touching on layoffs that TNA doled out just one week before my visit. “We were overstaffed in certain cases,” Carter says. “Certain times you have to take a step back to take a massive step forward.”
The recent downsizing was the latest step back for TNA, the well-funded, talent-stacked wrestling promotion whose goal since its inception in 2002 was to be the alternative to and perhaps even competition for Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment. But while Carter claims the company is profitable,1 she acknowledges TNA’s annus horribilis. Live events are down. Ratings have eroded — 2013 was the first year since 2006 that Impact Wrestling, TNA’s two-hour flagship program on Spike TV, averaged below a 1.0 rating, less than one-third of what WWE’s Raw pulls in on Monday nights. Main-event talent such as Sting and AJ Styles are gone, as are respected stalwarts Chris Sabin, Christopher Daniels, and Kazarian. Even the creative team has thinned: In the past 14 months, Bruce Prichard, Eric Bischoff, Hulk Hogan, and Vince Russo — men with historically successful track records who were responsible for the majority of the promotion’s story lines — have exited.
The most alarming departure was the December 2013 resignation of TNA cofounder, minority owner, and part-time wrestler Jeff Jarrett. “The time was right,” he tells me about ending his sometimes fraught, decadelong association with Carter. “I wanted to move on to another chapter of my life.” And once he left TNA, Jeff Jarrett, third-generation wrestling promoter, did the one thing Jeff Jarrett knows how to do: He started another wrestling promotion.
News of TNA’s troubles, already well known within the Internet wrestling community, went public on July 27 when TMZ reported that Spike TV would not renew Impact; the current deal, which ran to October, was recently extended through the end of the year. “TMZ asked me, ‘Hey, is this story real, should we run with it?” Carter says as she settles into a couch. “I was watching a movie and didn’t see it until some little wrestling site ran it. Then I gave TMZ a quote, which said we’re still negotiating. That never made it to print.”
Despite being the network’s highest-rated program, Impact Wrestlingreportedly was too expensive for Spike to offset the minimal advertising revenue. Spike is also rumored to be expanding its target demo beyond males ages 18 to 34. A network rep wouldn’t comment, citing ongoing negotiations, but added, “The relationship has always been tremendous and collaborative with Dixie and her team.”
TNA losing its television deal is the latest harsh reality the professional wrestling industry is facing. Even WWE, which dominates the marketplace, is struggling. In 2000, Raw averaged a 5.88 rating and the company’s pay-per-view buy rate hovered around 517,000. Last year, Raw scored a 3.01 and, despite more than a million buys for WrestleMania, pay-per-views were down to 330,000. And the WWE Network’s low subscriber number spooked Wall Street in May, sending the company’s stock tumbling to $11.27 a share from a March high of $31.98. (At press time, the stock sits at $15.01.) The numbers don’t lie: Professional wrestling went into a deep recession following its late-’90s boom and has now settled into a decadelong malaise. The battle between WWE and Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling drove the business to its zenith. Now there might not even be room for a no. 2.
Still, Carter sees this moment — a time when her company is losing its television deal and her entire industry is slumping — as an opportunity. At least that’s the spin. Since debuting on Spike, Impact Wrestling has occupied four time slots over four different evenings, including last month’s eleventh hour move to Wednesday — there wasn’t even time to change the “tune in next Thursday” sign-off. She craves stability in addition to more hours and more programming. “We will die a slow death on the vine if we just stay as one two-hour show in the U.S.,” she says. “I have big decisions to make. I want this to be a big play. I don’t want this to be a status quo play.”
Soon after the TMZ story broke, executive VP of talent relations and creative John Gaburick sent TNA talent a two-paragraph email updating them on the television situation. Morale in the locker room was surprisingly strong, although by now the wrestlers have developed a thick skin. “I’ve [worked] 95 percent of the shows this company has run, and from day one the Internet, the public, has tried to bash TNA,” says the wrestler Bobby Roode. “We’ve been here for 12 years and after all the negativity and all the bullshyt — ‘They’re going down, they’re going under, they’re done’ — we’re still here.”
Carter delivered a similar pep talk before an early-August TV taping at theManhattan Center. “I may have let a cuss word or two slip,” she says, sounding like a teetotaler who’s just snuck a taste of rum raisin ice cream. “A couple of guys came up to me afterward and said, ‘We believe in you. We believe in this company.’”
TNA suffers from the curse of being no. 2. It is little brother, forever obscured by the Master of the Universe. It is the Jets, the Mets, the Clippers. And bad things happen to TNA. The company has been victimized by rotten luck. But by and large, poor decision-making and mismanagement are at the heart of TNA’s woes.
The latest TNA scandal, which might be the most TNA scandal yet, was seeded last October when Carter rehired Russo, a writer who worked with the company from 2002 to 2004 and then 2006 to 2012, to consult on the creative team. There was a hitch: Russo had to keep his new job a secret. A former video store owner from Long Island, Russo is one of the most controversial men in wrestling history. He’s abrasive, a disruptor with a reputation for not playing well with others, and is partly responsible for removing the “wrestling” from professional wrestling, much to the dismay of traditionalists.
“The Internet wrestling community thinks in-ring wrestling action should take up every minute of every show,” Russo says, practically shouting. “That’s what they believe the business is. That’s what they are fans of. I mean, they rate fake wrestling matches on a star system. The matches are fake! They are not real!”
As a writer, Russo places an emphasis on soap-opera story lines, long promos, backstage vignettes, and TV-14 edginess over in-ring action. Russo has his vocal detractors. “He’s a cancer,” says Jim Cornette, the longtime wrestling manager, promoter, and writer who worked alongside him in WWE and TNA. But Russo also presided over the early days of WWE’s Attitude Era, the biggest growth period in the billion-dollar company’s history.2 He failed miserably when he tried duplicating the formula in the now defunct WCW.
But why the secrecy? A July report stating that Russo’s hiring was clandestine because Spike TV did not want to work with him has been debunked. “Vince Russo never meant anything to Spike TV,” said David Schwarz, senior VP of communications with Spike, in a recent statement. “He had nothing to do with negotiations. Nobody cares about Vince Russo at Spike TV.” Russo, who says that Spike knew of his employment since January, has a different theory. “It’s because Dixie was afraid of what the Internet was going to say,” he says. “She puts heavy stock into the Internet wrestling community and all of the dirt sheets from day one. She’s obsessed with reading them, reading what they say about the show and what they say about her. She didn’t want the backlash of hiring Vince Russo, who the Internet hates.”
I couldn't post the entire article because it exceeded the word count for a post. Read rest of the article here: http://grantland.com/features/tna-professional-wrestling-dixie-carter-jeff-jarrett-wwe/
gonna take a look, props.
