Billy Corgan speaks about the change in the NWA several years removed from the start of the pandemic.
Coming up for the National Wrestling Alliance is their 74th Anniversary shows on August 27th and 28th. Billy Corgan, owner of the organization has been making the media rounds to promote the forthcoming weekend of events.
Stephanie Chase has an interview with Corgan and during their chat, she asked him if he ever thought about not bringing the NWA back as they were not running during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said he thought long and hard about it, but in hindsight, it turned out to be a positive for the organization because he was able to reorganize and become more hands-on as a result.
I thought long and hard about not bringing it back [Corgan said about the NWA as the world was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic]. Not because I didn’t care. It’s just very difficult for me between my musical life and my wrestling life and so, the advantage of all that time being down — I think we were down about nine months or so. We still did some stuff but we were down in terms of normal television programming. It allowed me a lot of time to really think about, okay, well what do I really wanna do here? If it’s really down to me, if I have to choose between music and wrestling or my personal life and wrestling, well what is the commitment level that I’m gonna have? And the positive side that came out of it is I was like, no, I really, really wanna do this. This is really important to me. This is probably even more important to me than I thought it was and that time allowed me the chance to really think it through so that when I came back, I brought it back, I reorganized the company, I got way, way more involved on a daily level than I did before and I think you can see the results of that now. Not just my own participation, but getting other people involved behind the scenes and I think that’s really been critical so in a weird way, taking a step backwards, taking a moment to breath because producing weekly television in its own particular way has really allowed me the focus that I needed to bring it forward and as much as I don’t like that time and having to shut down, I think it was probably the best thing that could happen to us because making that commitment has been everything now for us.
Ricky ‘The Dragon’ Steamboat is scheduled for NWA 74 weekend and he’ll be appearing at the Powerrr tapings. Billy shared that they tried to book another legend who he chose not to name, but WWE restricted said individual from appearing due to their contract with the company.
You know, you get hooked up into a network of people in wrestling who know different people and can book different people and I was surprised that Mr. [Ricky] Steamboat was available to be booked because certain legends are under WWE contracts. They’re not able to appear without WWE’s blessing. In fact, we tried to book someone else whose name I don’t need to mention and unfortunately, WWE restricted their appearance which is fine. If that’s the business, that’s fine. I don’t have an issue with it, but I was surprised Mr. Steamboat was free to be able to come in and so we were happy to be able to book him for our TV show in Nashville, NWA Powerrr.
With the new regime in place at WWE, Corgan feels there is a chance of the two sides working together and cited Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque as being a fan of old school NWA.
He added that WWE does not need NWA, but there could be a benefit to having a different audience get into WWE outside of their regular audience.
There might be a point now that Triple H is running things where he might be open to events. I know they’ve been very friendly with the NWA since I bought the company. Triple H has made no secret of the fact that he’s an old school NWA fan so there might even be a situation where the NWA could work with the WWE. Now, I’m honest in saying that WWE does not need the NWA [Corgan smiled], but there might be a thing there where opening those doors, WWE might find there’s a different audience that might come in than the historical WWE audience because of the history of the NWA, because of the media and that might provide an opportunity for them that would be attractive.
At NWA 74, Homicide is defending the World Junior Heavyweight Title against Kerry Morton. There’s an interview with Morton here on the POST Wrestling site via the Andrew Thompson Interviews YouTube channel.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Stephanie Chase with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
