On a recent edition of his “The Kurt Angle Show,” WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle discussed the state of TNA Wrestling in 2010.
The Anthem-owned promotion switched to Monday nights to compete with WWE RAW at 9:00 PM EST in March 2010, but quickly moved back to Thursdays by May.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On TNA Wrestling moving to Monday nights in 2010: “I was excited about it, to be honest with you. I was really excited because I wanted to compete with WWE, but we learned very quickly that you cannot compete with WWE if you don’t have the money available. TNA had money, but they didn’t have the money that WWE had so it was really hard to compete against WWE. And I’ll give you an example: Hogan and Bischoff wanted us to rent bigger venues, so we had to pay for those up front. And those bigger venues, they were for house shows, not even TV. Some of them were TV, and some of them were house shows. But they wanted to rent these out, and it’s a lot more expensive. So now we’re booking all these shows all over the country, and we have to put up the deposit. It’s a good bit of money.”
On where TNA went wrong: “So, I just think that we did everything really too quickly. I think maybe we should start with Monday night with your TVs [in] bigger arenas. But we did it all really quickly, and it was just too much. That first Monday, I mean, it was our best rating ever. We were consistently doing about 2 million a week at that particular time. So I’d say that was the highest peak in our company’s history. I think that we had the highest ratings at that particular time. And I think that’s the only time that we could probably take a chance and try to go up against WWE. But it didn’t didn’t work out. And I told Dixie, ‘Listen, back off, back away. That’s it. You don’t have to be number one. It’s okay to be number two, especially where we were in this.’”
On the TNA roster in 2010: “You know, we had Hulk Hogan, we had Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, Ric Flair, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Ken Anderson. The roster was loaded. So, there was no reason we couldn’t continue to work and try to build the company.”
