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Interview by Danny Flexen

Danny Flexen is the Deputy Editor of Fighting Fit magazine (FightingFitMagazine.com) and a contributor to Boxing News and Power Slam. You can follow him on Twitter @DannyFlexen.

Here is a pretty extensive interview with Jeremy Borash from when he was in London a few weeks ago.

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Tell us a little about your background and how you got into wrestling.

I started radio [in Minnesota] when I had just turned 15, because I had just got my driver’s permit to drive and my mom had to drop me off at the radio station. I also did a television show [Jeremy Borash Live!] when I was 15 – I was real lucky to get a really cool gig at a pretty young age. I was doing radio and television when I was 15, 16, 17 I finished high school, went to a broadcasting school, got out of that when I was 19. I was really lucky in that I knew what I wanted to do really early and I got into radio and, long story short, I ended up doing a professional wrestling show. I had a big interest in wrestling from five years old and we had some open air time on a Saturday morning at a Christian radio station I was working at and the general manager was a huge wrestling fan so I somehow convinced him to let me do a two-hour wrestling talk show on a Christian radio station. So I think God wanted me to go into the wrestling business. Through that I met [internet wrestling figure] Bob Ryder, who got me a job with Eric Bischoff at WCW and I started there in March ’99. And I’ve been full-time [in wrestling] ever since.
When WCW went out of business I hooked up with Jeff Jarrett and we started TNA. I’m one of the few people still around that was there at the very beginning of TNA.

When you joined WCW, like you said, as a lifelong wrestling fan, there must have been a feeling of living the dream for you.

Completely. I was shocked, I was stunned that I was getting paid to do this. And I don’t know if you know about WCW but they weren’t cheap. They paid their employees really well, it was a very profitable company at that time. So, yeah, living the dream and couldn’t believe I was still doing it; I kept thinking, ‘This is going to end somehow, probably not well.’ I knew from when I got into WCW that it was, from the get-go, on borrowed time. It was pretty obvious, pretty early, so I just tried to learn everything and use that knowledge to help launch TNA.

How did you and Bischoff get on when you initially began working together?

Eric and I have had a strange relationship; we still do. We actually went to the same high school, I have family members that sang at one of his parents’ funerals, so we’ve got a lot of really strange connections in Minnesota. And to this day I think we have a good mutual respect for each other, so many different philosophies on things but a mutual respect.

So you were living the dream – your first big wrestling job – but was there an element of disappointment at the timing of your arrival in WCW? Because the Monday Night Wars had been virtually concluded as a competitive contest by that point and your side had lost.

Yeah, sure. And it was a very competitive time and when it ended I thought, ‘Ok, that’s it, I’m going to go back into radio, you know, who knows what’s going to happen?’ Right after that I ended up going over to Australia and working for a wrestling company called World Wrestling Allstars, which actually toured over here [the UK] two or three times. So I stayed in the wrestling business and met Jeff [Jarrett] kind of through that and we started to get some ideas going. So it was disappointing but at the same time I’m really glad I had that experience. I actually got into the business kind of the opposite way to what most people do. I started off in a huge job with a six-figure income versus working your way up, I just kind of jumped into it and then had to take a step back, start all over in a very modest way with TNA. Those early days were very modest.

Did you encounter much resentment for that – the fact you had come in right at the top level?

No because I always – still, to this day – have a huge respect for who I work with and what the guys do. I know it’s not about me, I’m just here to make the other guys look good. Any good backstage interviewer or any role where you are presenting talent, you have to never forget that they’re the stars. And that’s the respect I’ve got over the years from, being able to work with literally everybody from [Hulk] Hogan, to [Ric] Flair to Randy Savage. You try your best to make them look good in any way you can.

What were your key responsibilities in WCW?

I hosted a nightly internet talk show for two hours a night. It was live. I ended up going on the road, being on the writing team. What I ended up doing was just moving down to Atlanta. There’s a famous Seinfeld episode where Kramer just starts going into the office, he doesn’t have a job. I moved myself down to WCW, I was doing this internet show at night and I just started going into the office; nobody really knew what I was doing. I didn’t know where to go! I was just kind of making my way around so through that just – a month I was down there – I got on the writing team, convinced people I knew what I was talking about even though I didn’t and yeah, just learned, tried to learn as much as I could. It was an education more than anything else.

Who was head of the writing team at the time?

Back then, well, when I started writing, Vince Russo. I really got in when he came over from WWE [in October 1999].

As someone who was there when WCW started to decline, you are well placed to diagnose the reasons for its failure. In your opinion, why did it go down?

There’s a million reasons. It just got too big. There was a lot of money being spent and once something gets so big and has a corporate structure like that – AOL and Time Warner were the owners – you find a lot of times that, when something is so successful, people jump in and want to take credit for it, want to start controlling it and I think you had a really big amount of high-level executives jumping on this profitable area of AOL/Time Warner, making bad decisions, spending way too much money. And, at the end of the day, when it was decided that television was cancelled off the Turner networks [in March 2001]… when you own a wrestling company, the only thing you really own is the tape library, you assume the contracts [of employees and independent contractors], a ring and that’s about it. The television contract is what you’re about – without that you don’t really have a wrestling company. When that contract was cancelled, that was it for WCW.

From a writing perspective, though, were mistakes mate?

You know what, I don’t believe… as far as the writing goes, you can make the argument that the viewership declined a lot but from somebody who has seen a lot of good writing and a lot of bad writing, the most important thing is that it’s a business still at the end of the day and you’ve got to live within your means like anything. And if you overspend and don’t deliver on the profit at the back end, you’re not going to survive.

When you talk about the overspending that was prevalent, would a key part of that have been the special guest stars on Nitro?

Not necessarily, I think [it was] on a bigger scale. Paying talent way too much, in terms of what was coming in. When you’re paying millions of dollars and getting so many millions less back, you’re losing money. And at the time, there was a couple of really profitable years for WCW and when that went away and the fans weren’t coming out – wrestling does go through peaks and valleys, sometimes it’s real hot, other times there’s down-time – there were a lot of mistakes made but nothing you could really pin on writing as the sole reason. A lot of people could say that but corporately that company was so big… you cut out those expenses, you can make that thing work. It’s international television distribution, there’s a name, there’s a tape library, there’s licensing, a million ways that you could cut costs and still be very profitable. So I would say it was more of a business thing than a writing or creative thing.

So, with that in mind, do you think TNA generally, and you personally, have learned some lessons from WCW’s collapse?

Yeah, I think I learned what not to do. But I’ll also say I’ve learned more in TNA than I ever did in WCW. Only because, when we started, it was four or five of us and you could count the amount of people walking the earth that have the experience on one hand of starting a wrestling company from an idea and seeing it all the way through to a worldwide distribution centre – we’re in 120 countries now. Not a lot of people have the experience of taking an idea that was literally born on a boat in New Orleans and seeing it through to now when we’re touring the world. Having that experience and the growing pains of seeing – you, know, like any business, you start up a business and most don’t make it. We didn’t; we came close but the experience of seeing what to do and what not to do has been a constant evolution. I think the experience of the last nine years, working for TNA, has given a few of us a perspective that no-one else has.

When WWE bought out WCW in 2001, was there ever a possibility of you working for WWE as part of that deal?

No. I knew the last Nitro… there was some hope, like anything you don’t know what the future holds but I had no optimism that I was going to go work for WWE under any circumstances. They picked 16 wrestlers I think, no announcers. They didn’t need us. At the same time, I’m kind of glad they didn’t because obviously TNA wouldn’t have started and we wouldn’t have had that opportunity to do it.

So how did TNA come about? You said there were five of you there at the conception?

Yeah, give or take. Basically, the embryo of that was working for the World Wrestling Allstars prior to. I had worked with Jeff Jarrett closely and we had done international tours, watched what another guy did and the mistakes he made. We learnt from them and thought, ‘We can probably do this, we just need to get the funding and we can move forward with it.’ Once Jeff, who was a complete visionary on a business level and is probably the biggest influence I’ve had in seeing what he does, had to go out there and convince – from the get-go, HealthSouth was our initial owner, our initial partner, I should say, in the venture – them, to get into a boadroom of healthcare executives and convince them to invest millions of dollars in a wrestling company takes a hell of a salesman. So obviously, Jeff had his ducks in a row and if you can tell me anyone else on earth that could go do that, and now we’re owned by an energy company. It’s not a traditional business set up by any means but if you look at the structure of it, we’ve been successful on a business level. Those dollars and cents are the bottom line and what matters most.

What were your key responsibilities when TNA began and how have they evolved over the years?

I’ve worn every single hat you could wear outside of actually stepping in the ring myself which will never happen. What I do on the air is about five per cent of my job. I really spend a lot of time on the social media, evolving the live events – I’m on the road 200 days a year by choice; they don’t force me to do this, I’m over here doing promotions because they have enough faith in me that when I say, ‘I want to go do a fan party in Manchester, and bring out 200 people,’ they know what we’re doing works and give me the rope to do it. I’ll make something happen. The faith they have in me is really something I don’t take for granted and I really don’t disappoint them. I really try to over-deliver what I do.

Do you still contribute to the writing team at this moment in time?

The biggest misconception about the writing team and booking is all subjective, first of all. If you like something, great, and, if you don’t, that’s fine too but it’s a kind of thing where if the show’s really good, the wrestlers get the credit for it and if it’s bad, the writers get the blame. It’s a thankless job, a job I wouldn’t want, wouldn’t take, being a head writer, it’s 52 weeks a year, you don’t get a break, it’s a harder schedule than anything in Hollywood, anything in television – writing two hours a week, 52 weeks a year. The door is always open though, to submit any ideas, to anybody – that’s the philosophy that our writing team has right now: when you’ve got an idea, go pitch it. If you pitch an idea, it very rarely ends up how you pitched it, once everyone gets their hands in it. It’s definitely a team – everyone contributes.

Okay, let me hit you with some common criticisms of TNA and get your take on them. First of all, many observers say TNA uses too many older and ex-WWE performers who, while they may have name value, their best days in the ring may be behind them. What do you say to that?

There’s examples of that in everything. If you want to use Hulk Hogan or Ric Flair as an example, the doors that have opened to us as a business through having them, you can’t argue that. You can say that maybe you don’t want to watch them wrestle, that’s objective, but if you can show me definitive ratings that dive when they come on television, I’ll say, ‘Okay, maybe you got a point,’ but that doesn’t happen. But is there too much of it? That’s subjective, but I also know you’ve got to use those guys to build new stars. Ric Flair has done a great job of building Beer Money [Inc] and you’re going to see a lot of examples of that. As long as that happens and as long as they’re used to elevate new stars, I have no problem with that whatsoever.

Another common criticism of TNA is that the company perhaps tries to pack too much content in to a short space of time and that having too much going on may confuse the viewer. What would you say about that?

We get minute-by-minute breakdowns of the show and the world today is a very different place from when I was watching wrestling as a teenager, when I was watching the Monday Night Wars even. Attention spans are a lot shorter, people don’t, a lot of times, sit through a 20-minite match like they used to, the ratings will show you that, the minute-by-minute breakdowns. People tune out. So you are gearing your programme to a television audience now and you have to write your programme differently when you are dealing with the bottom line, which is television ratings – you’ve got to keep the viewers. You could make the argument, ‘Well, the Knockouts always get the highest ratings,’ but do you put them on the entire show? Of course not, but do you feature them? Maybe you do. You’ve got to adhere to your viewers and the numbers are what they are and you have to try and write the best show you can according to what you think is the best and what has already been shown to be the best way to get those ratings.

How much would you say TNA, as a company, is influenced by WWE, who are of course your principle competitor and the industry leader?

Influence on a creative standpoint? Very, very little. We’re all very busy. I can tell you I don’t have time to watch their show – I watch it as much as I can but I’m rarely home. I can’t speak for the other guys. I know the wrestlers watch it a lot and I notice a lot of the moves you see on TNA first end up being done elsewhere. From a business standpoint, it’s not so much us against them in my mindset. I just want to do the best job I can and put out the best product that we can. If we’re profitable and we’re a company that’s thriving and continuing to grow, you know it’d be great to beat them. There’s fear – you look at the numbers here in the UK and they don’t lie – we’re doing great here against them. The differences here in the United Kingdom in the brand loyalty versus America is a little different. People here are more accepting of something new and exciting and different and fresh, whereas in America, if you grew up drinking Coca Cola, even though Pepsi might taste better, you’re going to probably still drink Coca Cola. I think over here, people are more accepting and we’ve seen in a very short time, the brand loyalty for TNA has been very greatly accepted. I can’t believe the crowds we get coming out to do the things like we did last night in Manchester, turning people away. We just did a meet and greet in Nottingham at noon on a Friday and we got a huge crowd. It’s exciting – this is the best place in the world for wrestling.

Let’s focus more on the positives now: which elements of TNA do you believe are superior to any other wrestling organisation out there?

Our roster is superior to anything else on earth, just [in terms of] talent. You can’t tell me there is anybody that’s as talented in the ring as AJ Styles in any other organisation. Kurt Angle, you could make the argument, Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels… I could keep going. Our roster is phenomenal.
Our live events blow away anything that that’s ever been done in wrestling before and you have a lot of progressive thinkers behind the live events. The entertainment dollar these days is stretched so thin and you’re asking fans to pay a good amount of their money to come out and see you, so you have to over-deliver, you have to give them something different. We really want to give an interactive experience, instead of just sitting there watching a match.

What are the areas where you feel TNA needs to improve over the next five years?

Our company has been in constant evolution. We might throw something at the wall and if it doesn’t stick, try something else. Look at Impact now and how different it looks, it’s a long, long way from Nashville, Tennessee in those early days. And those changes don’t happen overnight, it’s been baby steps. We’ve just got to continue to stay the course. A lot of fans ask, ‘When are you going to do a live event here, when are you going to bring Impact over here or a pay-per-view over here?’ Well, we’ll do it when we’re ready and it makes sense from a financial perspective. It’ll be sooner rather than later but we don’t try to overstep our bounds and if we do we’ll know quickly and regroup. As far as what I’m involved in, we have 500,000 friends on Facebook – I want two million, I want that now, so there are goals that we have in store. The biggest thing we have right now is reaching out to the fans in different ways.

Final question: a lot of TNA’s big stars have been imported from WWE and elsewhere; who is going to be TNA’s next big homegrown star?

If I could pick one guy who is going to be the one to watch in 2012, it would be probably Bobby Roode. He’s got it all. He’s been offered deals up there [WWE] for years and he’s stayed loyal to TNA. I think the fact he’s got everything it takes to be a really good, solid world heavyweight champion that can carry the ball. I know that, a lot of other guys know that and I think the world’s going to know that pretty soon.

Interview by Danny Flexen

Danny Flexen is the Deputy Editor of Fighting Fit magazine (FightingFitMagazine.com) and a contributor to Boxing News and Power Slam. You can follow him on Twitter @DannyFlexen.

Source: lordsofpain.net