On a recent edition of his “My World” podcast, WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett discussed TNA Wrestling reaching out to Taz in 2009, the King of the Mountain concept, and other related topics.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On how quickly TNA approached Taz following his WWE departure: “I believe Vince Russo was the first one, that was the conduit. I don’t know, I do not know because look, it’s no secret: me understanding Dallas and the budgets, and everything that went with that. And the affinity that Kevin Kay — and I mean from day one, whether it’s Scott Fishman, Brian Diamond, Neils, the marketing folks — the Spike team, they liked Mike [Tenay] and Don [West]. So I immediately thought of Taz as a mouthpiece. But obviously, that changed direction in 2010.”
On the King of the Mountain concept: “It’s a reverse ladder match, it’s obviously for a title. And you have to climb the ladder and hang the belt. As opposed to climbing the ladder and grabbing the belt off, you climb the ladder and hang the belt. In order to be able to qualify — five guys start, you’ve got to get a pinfall. Gotta pin one of your four opponents, and that makes you eligible to win the match. And if you do end up taking a fall or get pinned, you get put in the penalty box for two minutes. So to me, it’s pretty damn simple.
“And I have witnessed many of these. And the vibe in the arena as the match and drama build, to me, is a lot of the magic of it. And the second one we had, we did one where we screwed Christian out of the title. People were — anyway, we’ve had some really — it’s good storytelling.”
On why fans are critical of the match: “Why is it criticized? In my opinion, I think — and didn’t WWE just bring back some kind of variation or something like that? I just think a narrative gets started. We just talked online, like that guy jumped another guy. And I would be willing to bet that… Mikael Judas, I bet he didn’t read the message board until somebody tipped him off about it. So it’s that narrative getting, ‘He said, she said,’ and built and this and that. The reality is the very small sample of these thumbs up or thumbs down, I think it totals in this particular pay-per-view, 100. So I don’t know, even if it did 30,000 buys or 40,000 or 20,000, that percentage of thumbs up or thumbs down: is it really reflective? I don’t know, I’m not here to debate that.
“But the narrative on the King of the Mountain match came out pretty quick of ‘Oh, that’s too hard to understand.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Have you watched even one of them? And if you did watch it, tell me why it was hard to understand.’ Because I was very open and very candid in the creative rooms before we ever had the first one. It was my concept, and the thought process, I was like, ‘Okay, poke holes in this.’ And the decision and the debate that we had going into this show Conrad, in the creative rooms are, ‘Hey, Jeff, don’t put two on there. Don’t put two on there.’ I’m like, ‘I hear you. But it’s Slammiversary; we’ve only had one for the last couple of years. How do we make this special?’ We definitely have to give the heavyweights a much heavier story, it’s got to be storyline-driven. You have AJ Styles in the match, which takes things to another level. But that X-Division King of the Mountain match, it was just so damn good. And those guys, the high flyers, they bring a different element to this match than the heavyweights. But I think to wrap it up, I just think once the narrative got started, it was much like ‘TNA LOL.’ That just, there was a lot of buy into, ‘Oh, it’s not a little bit bad; it’s all bad.’ Which you know, you look at [TNA], I mean hats off to those guys. What is — they’re year 22? It’s still going. It’s kind of amazing.”
