Kevin Nash had one of the better deals in wrestling during his TNA run, and he says the reason he enjoyed it was that he deliberately made it harder on himself.
Nash spent several years with the promotion across two spells and explained the arrangement on Kliq This.
“It was two terms. I would go Sunday to the pay-per-view, Monday, Tuesday tapings, two weeks off, Monday, Tuesday tapings.”
The part he says made the difference was where he stayed.
“I always stayed at the DoubleTree. I always stayed there so I didn’t make the ride back and forth, because I-4 is brutal, and I got a chance to still be one of the boys, got to hang out.”
TNA taped at Universal Studios in Orlando during that period, and the drive between there and the hotels further out is the one he is describing. Staying put meant he was in the same building as the roster rather than commuting in and out.
“I got to hang out with a lot of the young guys.”
He named a few.
“Alex and I became good friends there. Me and Jay Lethal got to hang. We had some epic parties in Jeff’s room there.”
Alex Shelley and Lethal were both part of the X Division at the time, and Shelley in particular ended up working directly with Nash. The pair fronted Paparazzi Productions, an angle built around Nash filming backchat videos with the smaller wrestlers on the roster, which ran into the Paparazzi Championship Series and gave Nash something to do that was neither a main event nor a nostalgia act. Jeremy Borash was running that side of it, and Lethal was working the Black Machismo character in the same period.
Jeff Jarrett is the figure at the center of the whole run, and Nash is clear about who was actually booking him.
“I was almost exclusively booked by Jeff. I wasn’t around very much during the Hulk and Eric time, because I was gone for most of it.”
Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff arrived at TNA at the start of 2010 and were the dominant creative force there for the following few years. Nash’s account is that his own involvement largely predated that, which fits the timeline. His most prominent run came earlier, as part of the Main Event Mafia alongside Sting, Kurt Angle, Booker T and Scott Steiner.
He was direct about the period as a whole.
“I had a very good experience at TNA.”
Jarrett has stayed one of his closest friends in the business. Earlier in the same episode, speaking about who has remained in his life, Nash put him alongside Bischoff and, at a different level, Hogan.
“Jeff is to this day one of my boys. There’s office guys like Jeremy Borash and Ross Forman, and I became very close friends with Eric Bischoff, and became friends with Hulk at different levels.”
The rest of his list was mostly from outside wrestling, taking in people he met on film sets. He named Conrad Goode from The Longest Yard and Adam Rodriguez from Magic Mike, both of whom he is still in contact with, as well as Joe Manganiello and Reid Carolin, who wrote both Magic Mike films.
Nash first joined TNA in 2004 alongside Scott Hall and Jarrett, working as part of the Kings of Wrestling, and returned in subsequent spells. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2015 and again with the nWo in 2020.
TNA is currently in a working relationship with WWE, with talent appearing across both companies’ programming, and Borash’s move to AAA is part of the same broader reshaping of the industry under TKO.
