By Jason Powell, Prowrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Impact Wrestling broadcast team member Don Callis spoke with VultureHound website and spoke about the departure of Jeremy Borash and how it affects the broadcast team. “Look, we’ve always had a plan with the announcing team with Impact,” Callis said. “It’s been a subject of feedback on social media. That plan is a longer term plan and it really hasn’t changed. I think that people spend a lot of time focusing on the people who leave but they don’t then acknowledge that there are new people who have come in. So for every EC3, he was a great performer that left, there’s a Brian Cage or an Austin Aries that’s up. So we think change is good, change is exciting.”
Callis also address his long term plans for Impact Wrestling. “I think we obviously want to grow the business and we want to make Impact destination programming on all our platforms for the fans,” he said. “One of the things that I think we noticed in the summer when we first started talking about coming in and working with Ed [Nordolm] is taking this thing in a new direction. The product had to loosely determine a cool factor in quite some time and we needed to get a positive buzz about the product.
“There have been more than a few false starts, with different leaderships over the years, and we want to establish some common sense or establish some consistency. We wanted to put on a cool wrestling product that people will say, ‘Hey, we want to see that, we want to see Brian Cage, we want to see Su Yung, and we want to see Austin Aries.’ People would miss last week and Austin Aries showed up out of nowhere. You have to give people a reason to watch. So I think the long-term plan is to grow the business and to make the product destination programming for wrestling fans everywhere.” Read the full interview at VultureHound.co.uk
Powell’s POV: The “change is good” theme is a logical approach to take in that it puts a positive spin on some talented people leaving while spotlighting some of the talent who will be on the roster. The interview is another combo platter with Callis and his executive partner Scott D’Amore answering questions. They also addressed taping three months at once time and whether that’s the approach going forward, why they and Nordholm are in the UK this week, and more.
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“I think that people spend a lot of time focusing on the people who leave but they don’t then acknowledge that there are new people who have come in. So for every EC3, he was a great performer that left, there’s a Brian Cage or an Austin Aries that’s up.”
Exactly. People only seem interested in the demise of Impact. They have been since its inception. WCW experienced this to a degree, but since then the desire to see everyone but WWE fail has reached an obsessive level.
Clearly, anyone that hopes for the end of Impact or any other company that dares to operate in the same world as the McMahon circus is not a fan of the business or the workers, just a WWE mark.
Also, ‘change is good’ is not only a logical sentiment, but an essential one for a company whose recent history has been marred by bad leadership who has ruined the reputation of the company.
People still refer to this company as ‘TNA’. Not as often now, but still appears. Normally, that type of brand recognition would be a good thing, but the TNA name carries the stink of Dixie Carter’s/Jeff Jarrett’s failures.
I revere Callis’ insistence on not only pushing forward, but continuing to get out in the public forum to provide a counter point of view to the typical doomsday themed posts by wrestling writers on the internet.
This is the first regime to really embrace starting anew and emerging from the rubble as something unique. For all Jeremy Borash did for the company, he was a lot like the TNA name. It was a reminder of the bad times.
Callis and D’Amore have a real uphill battle against the companies current position as well as all those that just want them to fail and die out so they can watch Impact reruns on the WWE Network.