Jeff Jarrett wants to correct a long-standing narrative about the founding of TNA: it wasn’t born out of desperation.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Jarrett pushed back on the popular story that he launched the company because he had nowhere else to go after being fired by WWE. He explained that his televised firing was largely a storyline, and that his financial reality was far more stable than the narrative suggests. “Vince did, quote unquote, fire me on TV, but I was still gonna have a contract for the next seven or eight, nine months,” Jarrett said. “The reality was I was paid through the end of October.”
Once that contract wound down, Jarrett said he took stock of his standing in an industry with only one major employer. “I never made a call to say, hey, man, JR, Vince, you got a job for me. You just kind of look back and know your place in the industry and go, you have no leverage, none,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t a wrestlers’ market. Without a number two, there is no number one. It was Vince owning the entire game.”
Rather than viewing that landscape as a dead end, Jarrett saw a lane to create something new. “That is really the thought process that went through my mind, that, man, there’s a real opportunity here,” he said. “TNA, just the narrative that is out there, it built out of desperation. I believe it was built out of an opportunity.”
