CHIKARA founder Mike Quackenbush recently appeared on the Two Man Power Trip podcast to talk about the promotion and more. Here are the highlights.
Building the loyal fan base of CHIKARA:
It never ceases to amaze me. For example, two of our fans named their daughter CHIKARA or every time I hear a weird story like that or some fan comes up and shows me they’ve got a sleeve on their arm of all the CHIKARA characters tattooed on them or that we ship an order out to Guam. It boggles my mind and part of it is as you guys know, when I was coming up, the internet was scarce or a handful of people that had access to the internet regularly and the kind of explosion of AOL chat rooms and people that had home computers and weren’t paying by the minute for access to where we are now and the ubiquity of the internet that someone could lift up their phone right now and be live and Periscope an entire CHIKARA event to the world. It boggles my mind.
The promotion nearly naming the company Impact Wrestling:
It’s strange to think about this now but we started talking about it in the Summer of 2000. This precedes the creation of NWA-TNA. We were talking about it and Tom (Carter AKA Reckless Youth) and I as well as Don Montoya who was one of our traveling mates. We decided after Tom came back from his WWF Developmental deal and I feel like when Tom came back they had beaten a lot of his passion for the craft out of him and I think that is a reoccurring struggle for everyone, self-included that I go through this like once a year where you are utterly burned out by what we do and you must be able to find the joy for your craft again. We kind of just decided that all we do is moan about how awful things are, shouldn’t we SHUT UP and do something and we decided yes, we are going to change things. We are going to do it by training people in a certain kind of way, we want a more cosmopolitan style that involves all of these International things and we originally wanted to call it Impact Wrestling and for quite a while maybe about four or five months it was Impact Wrestling and then when the time came and we were going to put up a fairly small sum of money, I mean it was a significant in reality for guys in their 20s and well at that point Montoya bowed out. So then it became Tom and I and when Montoya bowed out we decided we are not going to keep this name because that was for the three of us so it needs to be something else.
You can listen to the entire interview here.
