Billy Corgan on the NWA competing with WWE and AEW, Triple H taking over WWE creative, booking Matt Cardona to win his first major championship

On getting NWA to the same level as WWE and AEW: “It’s proportional. I’m not running four to five hours of content a week; I am running an hour to an hour and a half. You have to look at things to scale, if you look at what the big companies spend and the oxygen they get from the media vs. what I spend and what I get, you can see that I am outpacing my costs, so we are ahead of the curve as opposed to behind it. It does feel frustrating when you feel like you are behind the curve but we are ahead of the curve. For example, I was talking to someone who is in the television business. He looked at all of my expenses and said ‘How the hell are you doing what you are doing. How are you producing over 100 hours of television a year at these numbers with this level of quality?’ I said that it’s culture, it’s building a team and finding the right talent. It is building an atmosphere where the talent feel that they can take chances and if they go off the beaten path for a second then someone is not going to knock them with a club. That takes time and people don’t necessarily believe you. I do deal with people who have had promises made to them and then have the rug pulled out from underneath them. So it takes time for the NWA to be a safe space to work both physically and emotionally. These are high strung, talented people who want to feel that their efforts in the gym and the ring being rewarded.”

​On Triple H taking over WWE creative: “I’m looking forward to seeing what he does. Somebody asked me if I saw any changes and I said that you don’t turn a battleship around quickly. That’s a big institutional culture with a lot of pieces. As someone who runs a big organization with The Smashing Pumpkins world, you don’t flip switches and see what happens. You are going to poke around and put some people in places, but I don’t think we will know until about 18 to 24 months what the vision of Triple H is. I do know, well this is speculation, I do know as AEW has gone out of their way to pick fights with the WWE world and the WWE world has not responded, I don’t think that will continue under Triple H. I don’t feel that he is the type of personality that will let people sock him in the chops over and over again and he’s not going to respond. He was in D-Generation X and I think he was a big part of the sass that they had. I think there is business there as well, it is blow for blow and competitive. Now the position from WWE corporately, from what I see from a public observation, is we are not going to sweat it publicly even if we are sweating it privately. I think those dynamics are definitely changing.”

On giving Matt Cardona his first major championship: “I didn’t think about it until it happened and he started to talk about it. In my mind he was this big star, and I’m not a person who usually correlates being a star to championships, but that’s just the way that it goes. There is no question in his previous life that he was certainly undervalued. He was a guy who got continually over no matter what was put in front of him. I was certainly impressed by what he was able to do with seemingly not a lot. And there a lot of people I have worked with, Aron Stevens comes to mind, where they were just able to get over with whatever they were given because they are just super talented people. So it was not a question in my mind of putting the belt onto Matt. But now putting the belt on Matt, I think what distinguishes this is not only has he done a great job and brought an audience to the NWA that maybe wouldn’t have been interested in the programming. But in his darkest hour when he is injured and there is a pay-per-view named after him, he is facing a five to six month rehab, but the freak that he is he is pretty much already rehabbed in three and a half months. The day he has the surgery, he holds up the ten pounds of gold and says he will be at the pay-per-view. He doesn’t have to come, and I thanked him for that. I said thank you for everything you do and he said that it wasn’t a problem, he likes being here. That to me is why he is a champion. Yes he is a champion because he is a star, a draw and a top-level wrestler, but to me he is a champion because he is a great person to work with. He represents the company on every level behind the scenes and in front of the camera and to the public. Someone asked me how I felt that he got hurt on someone else’s show. Well that’s his life, I support that. By extension I support the effort of the other independent companies including Game Changer [Wrestling]. Matt Cardona is an independent wrestler in an era where he should be an independent wrestler. Unless I am going to come in and break the bank to sign him to an exclusive contract, he should go out to do what is best for him and Chelsea [Green]. So yeah, I have no problem.”