Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
Total Non stop Action aka TNA was a wrestling company that has seen its fair share of ups and downs. A company that was often on the brink of folding numerous times, but for whatever reason was able to find some source of income to keep afloat…even for a little while. One of those occasions happened in 2015, when then owner Dixie Carter found an “investor” in wrestling fan and Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan. This is a very real story that is much more interesting than any fictional storyline.
In April of 2015, Billy Corgan was brought into TNA wrestling as the head of creative. A little over a year later, he was announced by TNA CEO Dixie Carter as the new president for the company. Reports began circulating that Corgan was in line to purchase TNA from the Carter family and an announcement would be made before or after the company’s biggest show Bound for Glory in October. Running a wrestling promotion was nothing to new to Corgan, as he owned a Chicago based company called Resistance Pro Wrestling in 2011 and also was offered an ownership stake in ECW during its final days.
Bound for Glory came and went and no announcement of a sale was ever made. What we did get, was plenty of infighting behind the scenes of TNA between Dixie and Billy over who owned what. It was revealed that during his time in TNA, Corgan loaned Dixie three payments which averaged out to close to 2 million dollars to keep TNA afloat. Dixie had reportedly owed money to other investors as well as the state of Tennessee on back business taxes. Dixie approached Corgan for a loan and he obliged, but in the loan received a verbal agreement that he would ultimately gain ownership of TNA.
Corgan said that Dixie treated him nothing more than a “Money Mark,” basically just there to help finance the wrestling company. The flip side of that had Dixie calling Corgan a “loan shark,” who tried to strong arm Dixie into taking over her company in her time of need. She claimed that Corgan was hardly around during business meetings for TNA stating he only appeared at the Nashville offices twice in his time there. The two sides took their issues to court with Corgan seeking ownership of TNA wrestling.
The result saw the judge favor with Dixie Carter in that their agreement was null and void in the state of Tennessee, therefore, Corgan could not gain control of the company. The judge did award Corgan his money back with interest and Dixie remained owner. Anthem Sports & Entertainment ended up purchasing the company and paying back the loans to Corgan.
Billy Corgan revealed years later that he had big plans to turn around business for the promotion. It included rebranding the TNA name to something else and feature a strong roster of wrestlers. One idea he had was to have the popular ‘Broken’ Matt Hardy take a canoe into the middle of his The Lake of Reincarnation and throw the old TNA world title into it. He would then pull out a brand new world title with a new name out of the water signaling the birth of a brand new company.
Even though Corgan was on bad terms with Dixie during this period of time, he was willing to work with her creatively and make a huge storyline where Dixie formed a faction of familiar TNA wrestlers to fight with Corgan’s new company of wrestlers in a sort of invasion angle. Obviously, none of that came to pass and Corgan eventually moved on and purchased the rights to the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) instead.