For 16 years, Impact Wrestling has been one of the most newsworthy promotions in professional wrestling, but not always for the right reasons.

At their peak, the company was attracting millions of viewers worldwide and had a roster second only to WWE in terms of name value and mainstream appeal.

All seemed well, but a series of business and strategy disasters left the company surviving by a thread, as they bounced across different television networks with increasingly smaller reach.


Then, in 2016, long-time owner Dixie Carter finally sold her business to Anthem Sports & Entertainment Corporation, who soon began the arduous process of revitalising Impact Wrestling.



Have they succeeded? And where are they going? Metro Sport caught up with Impact President Ed Nordholm, plus Vice Presidents Don Callis and Scott D’Amore to establish whether Impact are still in the fight to succeed, or if they’re in a permanent lockdown.

I guess the first question is obvious. With so much incredible wrestling happening around the world at the moment, why should people care about Impact Wrestling?

Don Callis: If I look at it through the lens of a fan, I think any time there is a regime change in a wrestling company, people are curious. We’ve been fortunate that Scott and I have enough equity in the wrestling business based on what we’ve done as office staff, creative and performers.

People also see the business acumen that Ed and Anthem bring to the table. One of the cool things to get excited about is that you’ve got a good leadership team which is going to steer the ship. That creates a stable environment where talent can get over.

There has been talent here before, but when there’s not a stable environment or creative vision and when the business side and the wrestling side don’t mesh, it creates chaos for the talent, and they can’t get over in the way that they should.

We hope that there will be more surprises coming that people like, and we want to be more interactive with fans. Both fans and wrestlers told us that they didn’t like the six-sided ring, so we got rid of it. We’re going to continue to scour the globe for the best talent, because our fans deserve it.

There have been a lot of departures from the company over the past few months. Is that not a reason to worry?

Don Callis: Here’s the problem with the narrative that goes around with that. I’m not knocking wrestling journalism because it is what it is, but the narrative that’s been kicking around is that all these people are leaving.

That’s fine, and that’s true, but the context is not there. Are we okay with them leaving based on the new talent? They talk about who has left, but a lot less about who came. Yes, EC3 is a tremendous performer, he’s gone on to NXT and we wish him all the best. But, people just say he’s left, they don’t say that Brian Cage or Austin Aries debuted.



We use a lot of sports analogies around here. If you have new Head Coach for a team, they’re going to change talent and they’re going to draft new players that fit their particular system. That’s what we’re doing. It is a process, there will be more people coming in.

And we also have Alberto El Patron, who to me is one of the best pieces of talent I’ve ever seen in this business since I was seven-years-old.

What about the idea that your talent are on contracts that are effectively meaningless?

Scott D’Amore: It’s a false narrative that we don’t have talent under contract. The vast majority of our talents are under long-term contracts. Take a look at the departure of Bobby Lashley. He was under contract to us until almost Summertime this year. When he had other opportunities, we made a decision as a group that we were okay facilitating his release earlier than anticipated.

Contracts are going to come up and will need to be renegotiated on an ongoing basis, but there’s only a small number of talent that are going to have deals coming up in the next six months.

The talent we’ve been bringing in have been signing one or two year deals. People are always scared of change. EC3 was a great talent, but people are talking as if he’s irreplaceable. What was he before he came to Impact Wrestling? He was a guy who had been in developmental and never really panned out.


You look historically at this company and the people who have come here and built a reputation, and when they leave, people think they’re irreplaceable. Well, what was Bobby Roode before he came here? Or Eric Young, or AJ Styles?

Ed, when you look at where Impact Wrestling was, and where it is now, how do you feel? Impact was attracting over a million viewers a week on Spike for years, but now the Pop TV ratings are much smaller. Is the company paying a penance for the past?

Ed Nordholm: Of course, absolutely. There is no question about that. For whatever the reason, it was a bad couple of years. There was hurt from bad business decisions made worse by bad circumstances. Any number of factors, you can’t get away from the fact that the company went through a tough run.

They lost their Spike deal and a ton of revenue as associated with that. They then lost Destination America, lost even more revenue moving to Pop TV, and when you lose that much revenue in that short a period of time, there is bound to be all kind of challenges that even the most brilliant of business teams would not be able to manage.

The former Impact roster

To lose 20 million dollars in revenue in less than 24 months and not think there is going to be challenges as to how you manage your company through that crisis… I don’t think the former management deserves all the beating up they took, but you can’t avoid the fact that the company went through a massive negative shift.


They lost a lot of people, credibility, plus there was talent and management disruption and unhappiness. We came into that, came through the bedlam of 2016 where they were borrowing money from Anthem, Billy Corgan, Jason Brown and that whole mess with the litigation.

We started 2017 wondering if there was any way to put it all back together.

Why have you decided to keep the Impact branding, especially after the brief switch to Global Force Wrestling last year?

Ed Nordholm: For all the challenges, you can’t escape that there is 15 years of brand equity in the Impact Wrestling name. The unfortunate bit was the switch over to Global Force and not knowing whether to continue it because we didn’t know if Jeff was coming back or not. All that confusion didn’t help us at all.

That’s behind us. I like the name, it’s a strong brand. We know who we are moving forwards.

Scott, as someone who was at TNA at their peak, what was it like to return?

Scott D’Amore: I came back in February 2017 as a consultant. It was supposed to be two days, which turned into me sticking around. I left a company in 2010 that was just rolling in revenue, and I came back and see there had been some substantial changes and not many familiar faces.

If there was a fresh slate starting, and you had Anthem Sports and Entertainment, with Don Callis and Scott D’Amore starting a wrestling company and being on network television, I think you’d be off and running at the races.

We do have to overcome some of the issues of the past, and we’ll certainly do that. That’s a big part of 2018 for us, rebuilding trust whether it’s with the talent, our partners and the fans.

Impact was once a must see television show, but now, with three months of television being taped at one time, the need to see it has diminished. How difficult is it to create engaging television with the way the current structure is?

Scott D’Amore: I’m not gonna sit here and say that the idea of taping 12 weeks of television at one time is optimal. It’s certainly not, although there are some benefits to it. One thing that gets overlooked is that if you look at the recent history of wrestling, the industry became very reactive.

Something would be started, and a week or two into it, if they were concerned about it, it would be dropped. One of the benefits of doing so many weeks at a time is you have to map something out, and give it time to breathe.

In the current environment where things get put out there and if they don’t hit right away, sometimes they get dropped and never get an opportunity, well then maybe Rocky Maivia never would have got a chance to develop into the Rock. We’re in a situation where we’re filming three months of television at a time.

We don’t have to just look at that snapshot of one, two, three weeks. We’ve got 12 weeks of watching it develop and then saying “here is where we are” and making a decision from there. It does force us to set a direction. There’s times that I’ve seen in many different companies where things were booked week to week and there’s some benefits to that but there is certainly some negatives to that.

I think wrestling certainly works best when you have story arcs that go over multiple weeks and not just two or three, but ideally you want to have a story arc that goes two to three months for your main stuff or longer.

A key criticism of taping so far in advance is that both the fans in the arena and watching on TV burn out quickly. Are there plans to move to a shorter shooting format over the next year or so?

Scott D’Amore: Really what we’re doing is evaluating things on an ongoing basis. The most important thing is building trust which doesn’t rely on us filming live or us filming two weeks at a time or four weeks or ten weeks at a time. Building trust is when Impact says it’s going to do something, when it promises something, it delivers. We can do that under any schedule.

Would it be optimal to go out there and film less weeks at a time? Certainly. Will we continue to explore that? Certainly. But what we won’t do, is we won’t make rash decisions like sometimes we’ve made in the past based off “oh we have to do this!”. What we’re doing is we’re looking at being consistent. We’re looking at being stable and looking at being viable.

So what we’re doing in this room, is we have three individuals that all have various business backgrounds, having to run and be involved in businesses. We make business decisions. We have the power of Anthem Sports and Entertainment behind us which has its media club, but also its business club, and we’re not going to make a decision for this week or this month or this quarter.

There’s not going to be “BANG. One thing that’s going to happen” and all of a sudden everything’s great. This is going to be a process and it’s going to happen over a period of time. I always call it the “Dangling Carrot”. I’ve seen it in the past where you dangle that carrot just out of reach… “oh as soon as we get this, everything’s going to be great. Oh as soon as this happens you know we’re going to be off to the races”.

What we’re doing is we’re going to be making a bunch of small decisions over a long period of time where you’ll maybe not notice them even in each individual decision, but as they start to accumulate, you’re going to look and you’re going to see the positive effects.

The departure of Jeremy Borash was surprising for many long time Impact Wrestling fans. How will that affect the commentary going forward?

Don Callis: We have had a plan for the commentary team, and Jeremy’s departure doesn’t really change the plans that we have substantially and I think people would be wrong to assume that because of the last taping, that Jeremy and Josh were the commentators and that it would be the status on a go forward basis.

We’re not done making changes. We just weren’t going to do them all in Orlando. There’s always been a plan for commentary. I of all people recognise how important commentary is and Jeremy’s departure does not affect those plans. Jeremy has been a great employee and team member here. He’s super creative and you miss that, but I think we would all agree that him leaving creates an opportunity for someone else to step in and be creative.

Scott D’Amore: I’ve known Jeremy since the pre TNA days, and all of us are happy for him. One of the things about being a savvy business person and being a good leader is being prepared for the day that you’re not there. One of the things that’s been done wonderfully with Impact is nurturing other talent, not just in the ring but behind the scenes.

A lot of the time something appears on our show and instantly people go “(clicks fingers) Jeremy Borash” and he is a creative force and a huge part of what’s happened here, but we have other tremendous shooters, producers and editors.

Jeremy Borash

There is a structure in place where, sure Jeremy is a big part of things that happened here but certainly it’s not all of a sudden “oh my God, who’s going to produce this?”. We’ve got people that we can put on a plane and send to a location and do a very similar job and some of the most critically acclaimed shoots that we’ve done have been done by other people.

There’s going to be people who have an opportunity to do that. We don’t have to turn around and go “Oh my God, he’s one of our lead producers. How do we replace him?”, because we have people beneath him who now get a chance to step up to that spot and now we get to take somebody young and fresh and new and bring them in under the existing people and continue to nurture, and that’s an important part of any type of business.

You can’t be stale. You have to be ready to rotate talent and performers. You also have to be ready for the time when people move on behind the scenes or in front office type situations. That’s what makes organisations solid, reliable and dependable for a long period of time and we think we have some great people in place.

Josh Matthews has been one of the most controversial parts of Impact over the past couple of years, with his commentary frequently criticised. Will he be staying with the company going forward?

Ed Nordholm: I like Josh, he’s got his fans. People love him, they adore him. The more dialogue there is about someone good, bad or indignant, he attracts engagement and that engagement is important. I think he’s got his role in the company and from my perspective he does what he’s supposed to do. He gets out there and gets people to pay attention to us.

Don Callis: If I’ve learned anything, it’s that not everybody loves chocolate ice cream. Some people like chocolate, some people like vanilla, some people like orange sherbert. There’s a lot of people that like what I do in NJPW. Some people prefer Josh Barnett, and he and I are very different. We get compared a lot because we call the same product.

There’s people that like Josh’s style, and there are some that may not. That’s the wrestling business. Josh is a talented guy. He’s a good talker, in front of the camera, doing an interview, colour or play by play, I’ve seen him do well at both.

He’s a guy who can deliver the mail so to speak.

Scott, do you agree?

Scott D’Amore: Josh gets reaction on people. You saw what Josh can do last year when they did the angle with Joseph Park. He gets reaction on people and that’s important in our business. The other thing is, he’s also a guy that’s willing to… If you say “Josh, go write these ten stories and get them online”, he’s going to do that. If you say “Josh, go film these 10/12 segments”, he’s going to do that. If you say “Josh, go pick up the dry cleaning”, not that we would but he would go do that because he’s a guy who’s going to step in and do what he’s told to do and there’s a tremendous value to that.

He stepped into a position at a time when there was very few people on the digital side of things and he tried to run it as a one man show. Probably, really a situation he should never have been put in, but he didn’t complain and didn’t bitch about it. He went out there and did the best he could and did it until something could be built around him. I think Josh certainly has a place. You see he is… he can get people to certainly hate him. Maybe one of these days there will be somebody that loves him other than his wife (laughs).

Don Callis: In Josh’s defense, I think that part of the negative backlash on Josh was that, and I don’t even know who was on creative, there’s no point on knocking it, but I mean a lot of people didn’t care for the fact that there was an angle involving commentators. A lot of people don’t want to see that, they want to see wrestlers. It wasn’t Josh’s fault. That was what was written and he executed, and I thought he actually did a pretty good job of it.

I personally don’t want to see the focus of an angle be on commentators or office people. We’re here to promote the wrestlers and the performance. I think Josh probably took some unfair criticism because of that.

Ed, there was a lot of rumours going around at the start of the year that Rey Mysterio was close to signing with Impact. How close was that to happening?

Ed Nordholm: Rey Mysterio is a talent that’s out there on the scene, a world class talent. He’d say the same, you’d have conversations with him and see where he would fit and what works with his schedule and with ours, but what’s being reported in the media, there’s an entire group of wrestling fans who just love to make shit up!

It’s just always dialogue. He’s a world class talent that at some point in time, if we can make a deal that works for him and works for us, that would be great. But we’re nowhere near where the internet is reporting.

Don Callis: I think people make assumptions. They see a guy like Rey Mysterio who’s a free agent and they go “Oh my God, they must be trying to sign him”. Then things start to get reported and people often don’t ask us and look, we’re not going to talk about specific aspects of the business, but no-one ever talked about Chris Jericho working in anywhere other than WWE. He goes and works the Tokyo Dome and all of a sudden, people are speculating based on probably my friendship with him that (mimicking reporter) “Is he gonna debut in Impact Wrestling?”. I’ve never had that discussion with Chris. But it doesn’t stop it from getting out there.

You probably should get him in Impact!

Don Callis: Yeah let’s call him now! I just think that people look and they go “of course they would want him”. Rey Mysterio is one of the best ever. So is Chris Jericho. I mean people make assumptions but we’re just trying to run our business and take things to the next level.

Is there anyone not under contract at the moment who you would like to see in Impact?

Scott D’Amore: Like I said earlier, there’s not that one talent, that one thing where everything changes. It’s going to be a lot of small things. We want to go out there and see the talent and we’ve got multiple talents with who we’re going to have a coffee, chat with them and get to know them because there’s so much talent out there in the UK and around.

I can quite honestly say I’ve seen a lot of these guys on YouTube and videos sent to me, but to me you get one sense of somebody when you watch them on the screen, you get another sense when you’re sitting in that building and you get to talk to them and get to feel what they’re about.

We’d love to have Rey, yeah. Would we love to have Jericho? Yeah. Would we love to have The Rock come in? Yeah! Maybe The Rock will come here. The Rock’s done one show for somebody that wasn’t Vince McMahon and it was me. He wrestled me on one of my shows, maybe he’ll come back and do it again! Let’s report that. Let’s start a rumour.

Ed, the news that you won’t be keeping the trademarks and characters of your talent is a potential gamechanger. How hard was that to implement?

Ed Nordholm: Not that hard. I came in, I’m new to the business, trying to understand the roster and what we do, how we market them and how they work. I start seeing Rosemary, a wonderful talent, wonderful gimmick, great gal, and I find out that she doesn’t market herself as Rosemary when she’s not doing IMPACT.

The Broken Hardy Boys

So, how does that work? We’ve got our talent, who don’t have enough confidence in their characters that they feel like they should be developing a safety net. They’re developing the safety net because they don’t want to be starting all over again creating a new identity. It was a pretty tough process of getting guys to buy into the idea, that you know, this is kind of silly to be trying to control people in this way. The fact the Hardy thing was going on in the meantime was sort of creating a whole dynamic within which I was sort of trying to evaluate this.

Do you feel unfairly criticised for how the Hardy debate went down?

Ed Nordholm: Was I unfairly criticised? I think people are entitled to their opinions. I took a standard old school approach to who owns that IP (Intellectual Property). [I was] dead right on my position. It doesn’t really matter, to me that’s a very magnified example.

There’s no way we were going to create a different Broken Brilliance and have somebody else play those characters and try to monetize it differently. It was all about controlling what was going to happen with Matt Hardy and Jeff Hardy post Impact and who was going to make money off that.

To me, that’s the most encouraging aspect of the new regime, the fact that you’re not just sticking with your guns and being stubborn for the sake of it.

Ed Nordholm: It wasn’t with the Hardy’s, it was more seeing Rosemary, finding out why is Rosemary not putting herself out on indy shows as Rosemary. This makes no sense to me. I want Rosemary to be marketing that name everywhere. I started pulling back and realised, she’s not because she’s not going to be Rosemary the day after she’s not here anymore so of course she wants another identity that she’s equally pushing as well.

So that was the dialogue starter and when Don and Scott came in, we started talking about what we want out of Impact as a platform, where top talent want to come and want to believe that they are collaboratively working with us too.

Obviously we do well if they do well and they believe they can do well with us and they can maximise their energy on creating their characters, on creating their brand and going outside.

Is that the major difference between you and Dixie Carter? She seemed to be a businesswoman trying to be a promoter, whereas you seem to put importance in giving the right roles to the right people?

Ed Nordholm: Give me another 30 years and I can be a Vince McMahon!, In the meantime though, I’m quite content and respect the fact that I’m a Mergers and Acquisitions lawyer from insolvent companies and that has a good business mind and I have a sense about how I organise people and organise businesses/transactions.

I have full recognition that being a promoter is not going to be my value added to this company.

Finally, I’d like to hear how you would all like to see Impact improve as a company over the next 12 months across your own individual remits?

Don Callis: I just think that I would like to see by the end of the year that the company has what you would call a cool factor or buzzworthiness about it. I want people to talk about us and get excited about it in the same way that they talk about other promotions like NJPW or something Vince does.

The really encouraging thing for me is I think we’ve got the talent. We’ve got a really good core group of men and women under contract with us and we’re going to add new people.

There’s going to be more changes coming and at the end of the year I think that we are going to be a destination for wrestling fans, not just for hardcore long suffering TNA fans who are going “oh my God, ok, I’m going to stick with this”, but the new fans, those are the folks that we want to reach and we’ve got the talent to do it.

Scott D’Amore: For me really, 2018 is two things. It’s rebuilding that trust so that people know when we say something, when we promise something, we deliver. My goal is when we sit here, I want us to look back and say “you know what? Look where we were in January.”

March 8th at Crossroads on @PopTV – the DREAM MATCH is official. For the first time ever @AustinAries will face @TheRealMorrison with the IMPACT World Championship on the line. #IMPACTonPop pic.twitter.com/0BWTeG2g1T — IMPACT (@IMPACTWRESTLING) February 23, 2018

And coming from a construction background when we’d build roads and sewers, one of the things I loved at the end of every day is looking back and saying “S***, look how many f***ing metres of pipe we put in today”. I want us in the same functional way to sit here and say “Look where we are at the end of 2018. Look at all the strides, how far we’ve come”.

Maybe we’ve still got a long way to go before we’re where we want to be but I want to look back and go “f*** man, we’ve really moved forward” and I think it’s all going to boil down to making a lot of small decisions, making sure they’re the right ones and everybody just rolling up their sleeves and plugging away day in and day out.

Ed, we’ll finish with you?

Ed Nordholm: Not too different from these guys other than my specific ambitions for the company in 2018 would be to build on the milestones of 2017 which was baby steps to prove that we could go and tape our TV in India. I’d like 2018 to take that to another level, not grand but I want a bigger Impact in India.

From when we went to India and did that taping, that market has exploded for us from an eyeballs perspective over our digital platform ever since we’ve been there. Clearly it’s something, there’s an audience and demand there and I want to be taking persistent steps toward meeting that demand and presenting a product in the Indian market as part of our global brand, not just a special India product but making sure that our show is developed in a way to be even more appealing to that market and to be in that market.

The second obviously is the UK. I’ve become more attuned to just how far from the UK market we’ve fallen in the last couple of years and going back and seeing how important the UK has always been to Impact. We’re not going to get back to where we were in the 2018 but part of this trip is taking those baby steps to get back in that market, get back live, get talent, get the presence. I don’t know how big the presence will be in 2018 but we’ve got to do more than we did last year, that’s for sure.