In an exclusive for WrestlingNews.co, Steve Fall spoke with former Impact Wrestling/TNA star Angelina Love. Love is currently signed with Billy Corgan’s NWA. Angelina is taking bookings at ALoveBookings@gmail.com and she has a website with exclusive content at Angelinaforever.com. We have some transcribed highlights from the interview below but be sure to click on the videos for the full interview.
Angelina Love on why she left TNA:
“It was a change in management that was the catalyst for that. If you have 14 girls on the roster, Vince (Russo) is going to make sure that like 10 to 12 of those girls, if not all of us, are somehow incorporated on the show, so it was always very fair. I will just say this because they were not fond of me and I was not fond of them. Eric Bischoff and Bruce Prichard, once they kind of came in and got like an office position, it was just like, for me anyway, they were so nice to me before they had any kind of position, and then once they got into position, they would just walk by me like they never saw me, ever. They changed up so much stuff, and then it did become like, at least 40% less people that were always on the shows before were on the shows. It was minimal. There was like tumbleweeds blowing by backstage. There was like nobody there. I happened to be in the storyline with Winter at the time and it sucked. So then they didn’t like it. So then it was just like, ‘Well, we’re not going to do anything with that.’ We were all paid per appearance, so if you don’t work, you’re not getting paid. I had already been there like for five years at that point. They already knew what I could do, but once Vince kind of got pushed out, a lot of it was just was real negative and went downhill. I ended up quitting in July 2012. Hogan gets a lot of flack. I really liked Hulk. I put it all on Prichard and Bischoff.”
“I had heard of a situation where Eric had had a conversation with her (Dixie Carter) in the offices that really made her flip a switch and it went less from a kind of cozy family-ish, nice vibe backstage to being cold, like heartless, kind of just gray kind of vibe, and it was like, everybody could feel it. No one liked it. She definitely had the wrong people in her ear giving her very bad advice, and well, we see where that took them. She went off in her own world. She wanted to be Stephanie McMahon so bad. 80% of the Knockouts ended up getting pushed off the show because Dixie had to have 11 segments every show. She put herself all over the show, and it’s like, that’s not what people want. It’s not what people are tuning in for.”
Love had many positive things to say about NWA’s Billy Corgan. She put over Corgan as someone who is really smart and a person who just wants to have fun.
On WWEs LayCool stealing TNA’s Beautiful People Gimmick:
“I don’t think it was a Michelle McCool and Layla thing where they were watching us and decided to do it. That was absolutely a higher up thing for sure because we were on a show with Kurt Angle and Christian and Beer Money and AJ Styles and we were getting the highest rated segments at the height of what we were doing. TNA was really chomping on WWE’s heels. WWE was watching everything. They obviously needed to know what their competition was doing, so I think because at the time they both had, well they had me under contract and they had many opportunities to get Velvet under contract if they wanted to but they didn’t, so I think they kind of saw something that they never capitalized on somewhere else working really well, and they were like, okay, well this works, so now we got to do it, and we can’t have them, obviously, so we gotta do it in our own way.”
On WWE hiring and firing her:
“My two itty bitty little times at OVW were just that. Once Dreamer got into the talent relations position, I was his first hire. So they were doing this Divas tryout camp for like two weeks at OVW. It was the last week of November and the first week of December 2004. I had already been backstage at WWE like once or twice at that point. I went to OVW, but nobody from the office told Bill DeMott or Lance Storm, who were the trainers there at the time, that there was going to be this two week camp of girls coming into OVW. I was the first one that got there because I drove because I lived in Nashville. I go in and I was real early. Lance Storm was like, ‘Hi.’ I’m like, ‘I’m here for the blah, blah, blah’, and he was like, ‘What?’ So then he had to go call the office. He came back out and he was just like, ‘Wow, we did not know this was happening.’ I was like, ‘Cool. Well, I’m here.’ That was just kind of like my two weeks there. I got verbally hired, like two days in.”
“So the first time (she was supposed to be brought up to RAW), I tore my ACL training 10 days before I was supposed to debut. So that put me out. Then actually before I was even medically cleared, so that was in January ’06, I tore it. I had surgery on March 1. August, I was brought to SmackDown to possibly do something and I was placed in the crowd and it was like the first segment of the show. So they were doing Velocity, dark match Velocity. That’s when Booker was doing his King Booker thing and he knighted Finlay and Regal in the ring and my segment was supposed to be next. Then I got pulled from the floor by the guy who sat me. He said that Vince rewrote the entire show as soon as it started and my segment and the match that my segment was coming from were cut and he completely rewrote the whole show. Then it was like, ‘Well, we’ll probably have you back next week when we’re here’, and then that never happened. Then I had one more thing I was supposed to go up for when they were doing ECW still. I was supposed to go on a Tuesday to SmackDown because they were doing ECW before Smackdown then, but then the Thursday prior, I got released.”
This interview is exclusive to WrestlingNews.co. If you use these quotes, please include a link back to this page.
