Jeff Jarrett Talks GFW-TNA Invasion Angle, GFW’s TV Deal, KOTM Title & More

Global Force Wrestling founder Jeff Jarrett recently appeared as a guest on Ring Rust Radio to talk about all things GFW. Below is a transcript of the interview.

On how many episodes of GFW TV he is taping this week and what channel, dates and times will fans get to see the finished product: “You’re digging for the good stuff and I appreciate that. We just named it Amped, and we are in the discussion of how many episodes so I can’t tell you how many right now. We are going to be shooting on content next Friday, then August 21st, and October 23rd. One thing is for sure, we are starting four tournaments starting next Friday: The Global Championship, the Tag-Team Championship, the Women’s Championship, and the Nex-Gen Championship. We do have Bobby Rude appearing and in my opinion he personifies what GFW in some shape, form, or fashion is all about. He is a wrestler under a contract for another promotion who will be appearing on our program. The number of episodes is a moving target at this point. We are going to go shoot the tournament then we get back who knows? It could be ten episodes, twelve, fourteen, who knows? It’s a work in progress. When you are trying to line up domestic and international, it’s a real challenge to try and please everybody. We are going to do our very best to expose the product to as many wrestling fans as we can.”

On the Nex-Gen division and what type of performers will be part of it: “Nex-Gen is a term we really thought about and studied. When you look at pro-wrestling in 2015, there are certain guys that are going to wrestle like the next generation and they are going to take it to the next level. Whether it be the speed of the Young Bucks or the innovation of the Bullet Club, there are so many different talents that will take it to the next generation. Then you see a guy who is a rookie, brand new in the business, and isn’t a household name today. But in the next generation of household names he will be. It’s a little bit of both, no weight limit, it’s a division of guys who want to get in there and wrestle. They may never have won a title before or it may be their style of wrestling that will give them that first opportunity to wrestle for that Nex-Gen title. It’s not a traditional type of division by any means.”

On what GFW will do to separate itself from WWE as another PG rated product: “It goes without saying that WWE is sports entertainment. They invented the term and they do it better than anybody else. It’s a very lucrative business for them and my hats off to them on how they have created their genre. We are professional wrestling, there are a lot of similarities but we are going to be more docu-style. Are we going to have story lines? Yes. It’s like how you have story lines in a sporting event like a baseball or football game. We are not going to write stories per say, but more along the lines of documenting them. There is a story behind every GFW athlete. Questions like: Why, why did you get into the business, why did you want to be a professional wrestler, why GFW, why do you want to be a Champion, why do you do this in your persona, what makes you tick, what’s going on in your family life? That all affects the business and how you climb the ladder of success. That’s a big difference between writing story lines and documenting story lines.”

On the Finn Balor documentary and if that is the style he is looking to use for GFW: “If you watch the GFW YouTube channel it will give you a sample. Back at Wrestle Kingdom 9 we documented our journey leading up to it. We also have videos coming out to give you a feel for it with guys like PJ Black, the Bollywood Boys, the Akbars, and Mordetzky. The videos dive into the talent and the wrestler’s lives and what’s really going on in their world. Just recently, we took a real life situation, I went back into TNA with a lot of raw emotion and I don’t want to get to long winded on this, but a non-TNA talent left the promotion with the King of the Mountain title. Eric Young was pretty vocal about it backstage and went on a Twitter rant about it. He said it didn’t have anything to do with it but if you connect the dots you can see it. My hats off to him for being vocal about it. Eric and I have a personal relationship that goes back over ten years. He has been at every 4th of July party at my house except maybe one he missed. We have a real close relationship and I respect him because he didn’t go behind my back about his frustrations. He just made it vocal he didn’t like it. I told him he should come up on the tour and we can talk about it. He took me up on it and came and had a match against Johnny Gargano, local independent superstar, from the AIW. You don’t see that kind of stuff in any other promotion.”

On an invasion angle between TNA and GFW: “The word invasion is kind of been there and done that in my opinion. Certainly you can already see that Bobby Rude is coming to Vegas next Friday for the first ever set of Amped tapings and he is under contract with TNA. Eric Young was just with us this weekend. We are in discussions of the next steps of this business agreement. Global Force Wrestling and TNA wrestling, whether it’s a co-branded show, a co-promoted show, a collaboration, that’s all in discussion right now and I am reporting it in real time as much as I can. As a wrestling fan myself, this kind of stuff excites me because you just don’t see this nowadays. Years ago you had hand shake agreements between promoters, you had Ric Flair as a traveling champion, and Dory Funk working for multiple promotions. Once the territory system went away, you were left with the big two of WWE and WCW. Then you were down to the big one, just being WWE. Then you had had TNA and Ring of Honor come around with every promotion acting like an island. WWE can do that since they have north of 90% of the market share. You have all the smaller promotions fighting and clawing for that brand identity. I believe with GFW and our mission statement, we want to have a working relationship with any and all promotions because rising tides raise all ships. I went out and formed the relationships that I have had over the years and made them more formal with New Japan and Triple A and around the globe with the independent promotions in Europe, South Africa, and Australia.”