Impact President Ed Nordholm, Vice Presidents Don Callis and Scott D’Amore recently spoke with Metro UK; you can read a few highlights below:
Don Callis on why fans should care about Impact Wrestling:
Don Callis: If I look at it through the lens of a fan, I think any time there is a regime change in a wrestling company, people are curious. We’ve been fortunate that Scott and I have enough equity in the wrestling business based on what we’ve done as office staff, creative and performers.
People also see the business acumen that Ed and Anthem bring to the table. One of the cool things to get excited about is that you’ve got a good leadership team which is going to steer the ship. That creates a stable environment where talent can get over. There has been talent here before, but when there’s not a stable environment or creative vision and when the business side and the wrestling side don’t mesh, it creates chaos for the talent, and they can’t get over in the way that they should.
We hope that there will be more surprises coming that people like, and we want to be more interactive with fans. Both fans and wrestlers told us that they didn’t like the six-sided ring, so we got rid of it. We’re going to continue to scour the globe for the best talent, because our fans deserve it.
Scott D’Amore comments on contracts for Impact talents, how the company has successfully built talent over the years:
Scott D’Amore: It’s a false narrative that we don’t have talent under contract. The vast majority of our talents are under long-term contracts. Take a look at the departure of Bobby Lashley. He was under contract to us until almost Summertime this year. When he had other opportunities, we made a decision as a group that we were okay facilitating his release earlier than anticipated.
Contracts are going to come up and will need to be renegotiated on an ongoing basis, but there’s only a small number of talent that are going to have deals coming up in the next six months. The talent we’ve been bringing in have been signing one or two year deals. People are always scared of change. EC3 was a great talent, but people are talking as if he’s irreplaceable. What was he before he came to Impact Wrestling? He was a guy who had been in developmental and never really panned out. You look historically at this company and the people who have come here and built a reputation, and when they leave, people think they’re irreplaceable. Well, what was Bobby Roode before he came here? Or Eric Young, or AJ Styles?
D’Amore comments one benefit of taping so much content at once:
Scott D’Amore: I’m not gonna sit here and say that the idea of taping 12 weeks of television at one time is optimal. It’s certainly not, although there are some benefits to it. One thing that gets overlooked is that if you look at the recent history of wrestling, the industry became very reactive. Something would be started, and a week or two into it, if they were concerned about it, it would be dropped.
One of the benefits of doing so many weeks at a time is you have to map something out, and give it time to breathe. In the current environment where things get put out there and if they don’t hit right away, sometimes they get dropped and never get an opportunity, well then maybe Rocky Maivia never would have got a chance to develop into the Rock. We’re in a situation where we’re filming three months of television at a time.
We don’t have to just look at that snapshot of one, two, three weeks. We’ve got 12 weeks of watching it develop and then saying “here is where we are” and making a decision from there. It does force us to set a direction. There’s times that I’ve seen in many different companies where things were booked week to week and there’s some benefits to that but there is certainly some negatives to that. I think wrestling certainly works best when you have story arcs that go over multiple weeks and not just two or three, but ideally you want to have a story arc that goes two to three months for your main stuff or longer.
Ed Nordholm comments on the decision to allow talent to keep their characters outside of Impact:
Ed Nordholm: Not that hard. I came in, I’m new to the business, trying to understand the roster and what we do, how we market them and how they work. I start seeing Rosemary, a wonderful talent, wonderful gimmick, great gal, and I find out that she doesn’t market herself as Rosemary when she’s not doing IMPACT.
So, how does that work? We’ve got our talent, who don’t have enough confidence in their characters that they feel like they should be developing a safety net. They’re developing the safety net because they don’t want to be starting all over again creating a new identity. It was a pretty tough process of getting guys to buy into the idea, that you know, this is kind of silly to be trying to control people in this way. The fact the Hardy thing was going on in the meantime was sort of creating a whole dynamic within which I was sort of trying to evaluate this.
Nordholm continued, explaining the decision to give talent more control over their gimmicks:
Ed Nordholm: It wasn’t with the Hardy’s, it was more seeing Rosemary, finding out why is Rosemary not putting herself out on indy shows as Rosemary. This makes no sense to me. I want Rosemary to be marketing that name everywhere. I started pulling back and realised, she’s not because she’s not going to be Rosemary the day after she’s not here anymore so of course she wants another identity that she’s equally pushing as well. So that was the dialogue starter and when Don and Scott came in, we started talking about what we want out of Impact as a platform, where top talent want to come and want to believe that they are collaboratively working with us too. Obviously we do well if they do well and they believe they can do well with us and they can maximise their energy on creating their characters, on creating their brand and going outside.
