Jeff Jarrett and country-music star Toby Keith may have an announcement this week about the launch of a new promotion, news that at least at first would be welcome by many fans in the interest of seeing somebody, anybody, give WWE something in the way of competition.
But then you have to start thinking almost immediately … how, exactly, could an upstart, even one that presumably would go in well-financed compete with WWE?
More to the point, who would this company go to in terms of talent that would have any kind of drawing power, be it for house shows or a weekly basic-cable TV show that would almost certainly have to be a big part of the new company’s business plan?
No matter how much money Toby Keith is willing to invest, it’s not going to be the eff you kind of money that Ted Turner was able to bring to the battle against Vince McMahon in the 1990s. The Keith-Jarrett promotion would thus have to make do with what McMahon has left on the scrap heap, much in the same way that McMahon had to do when Billionaire Ted bought up all his stars in the mid-‘90s, and McMahon responded by building around WCW castoffs Triple H and Steve Austin along with a former tag wrestler named Shawn Michaels to form the nucleus of the Attitude Era that eventually won the Monday Night Wars.
AJ Styles is the most prominent free agent on the scene right now, and he can certainly bring credibility at the top of the food chain. Styles, of course, was the guy that TNA built itself around when it was getting off the ground a decade ago, so he knows the game.
The issue with building around Styles is his size (5’10, 202). He has to be in the ring with other small guys, at the risk of having your champ look like Haiti Kid getting squashed by King Kong Bundy. As with the early build stages in TNA, it can be done. Bring in a John Morrison, a Ted DiBiase Jr., a Jamin Olivencia, and you’ve got yourself a compelling group of potential challengers who can all make each look good.
There are other guys out there to flesh out the midcard. Mr. Anderson, for example, and Crimson, who had a promising early run at TNA. D’Angelo Dinero has the look and the mic presence to be worth bringing on. And I’ve always been a fan of Chris Harris, another former TNA Original.
Matt Morgan is the wild card here. Morgan is the anti-Styles (6’10”, 330), so big that you just can’t put him in a program with Styles and make it believable. If you try to build around Morgan, you have to wonder who you have him work with, the eternal issue of the giant in wrestling.
That’s an overly quick analysis of the free-agent landscape out there right now. What we see here is that there are guys out there to work with, to try to build around, but is there enough to try to base a third national company on? Who among this group puts enough butts in seats and eyeballs on the TV to make it so that Keith doesn’t lose whatever millions he would be willing to put to the effort?
Throw in Kurt Angle, and you can sell out any high-school gym or fairgrounds located east of the Mississippi with this group. That’s about the best I can say about what’s available on the free-agent market right now, unfortunately.
I say this even as I want Toby Keith, if he gets into the business, to be successful, because I’m among those who think that WWE has gotten stale from the lack of competition. For years, I’ve wanted TNA to fill the role that WCW and ECW used to, but it’s clear that TNA’s fortunes are on the wane and that the clock is ticking toward the end of that company’s run.
If anything, the inability of TNA and anybody else to present a valid alternative to the supremacy of WWE shows how hard it is to make money long-term in the wrestling business. Money (Turner-WCW) and smarts (Paul Heyman-ECW) alone can’t do it; you need to have both, and also some luck (McMahon-WrestleMania 1, the biggest roll of the dice in wrestling history) to bring it off.
The business consultant in me would advise Keith to run as fast as he can from any idea of getting involved in the wrestling business in any way beyond buying tickets to a show and having a good time watching. The fan in me says, good luck, and Godspeed.
Column by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
