Various: Billie Starkz on Athena Being “One of the Smartest Women” in Wrestling, Jeff Jarrett on Scott D’Amore’s TNA Firing, Indies

Feb 15, 2024

Billie Starkz Comments on Athena Being “One Of The Smartest Women In The Business”

A recent episode of Fightful’s In The Weeds podcast featured Billie Starkz as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Starkz’ thoughts about working with Athena in Ring of Honor and how Athena has been very helpful with improving her wrestling career.

“I genuinely feel like Athena is one of the smartest women in the business. People do not give her enough credit for what she does. Genuinely, from me starting in ROH to now, she’s been nothing but a help to me. I think she genuinely has such overwhelming knowledge of how TV is supposed to work, how to position yourself, how to just be more than what is the basic line. It’s helping a lot.”

Transcript h/t: Fightful.com

Jeff Jarrett Comments on Anthem’s Firing of Scott D’Amore from TNA

As noted before, TNA Wrestling President Scott D’Amore’s contract was terminated by Anthem Entertainment earlier this month and Anthony Cicione was named as TNA’s new President going forward.

In a recent episode of the My World with Jeff Jarrett podcast, former TNA co-founder and co-host Jeff Jarrett gave his thoughts about D’Amore’s recent firing from TNA.

“All I can do is share my personal experience, and as I sat didn’t and kind of drilled through everything, without knowing any of the details, and as things trickled out, you kind of hear, and I don’t know what’s true or not, but the one thing that was in there that he tried to buy it. If this is true, he wanted to spend more money. Obviously, I’ve shared this on the podcast, and I take full responsibility for my screw-ups, but the reality was, when I look back on my time, is that I was under the impression that budgets were gonna be bigger. There was gonna be more of an investment. The strategies were gonna be different. So in a lot of ways, I said, okay, that was in 2017. So from 2018 to 2024, six years, I think you have to drill down into, I don’t know the books, but the Asper family is very wealthy. They’ve made a lot of money through the years off of the television industry and cable, AXS, and Pursuit, and they did the merger of the acquisition. All that being said, I don’t know what TNA’s true financials really look like. It’s obviously Len Asper’s sole decision.
So I asked myself, what did the profit and loss look like over the last six years because there’s no way that you do the rebrand and you have, maybe it’s just the Internet, but it felt like the most buzz on the company in the last three years, four years, maybe longer than that. They had quite a bit of buzz. Just the timing of it all is very perplexing. Again, you don’t ever judge a book by its cover, but I don’t know what the financial picture looks like. But the timing of it all, I’ll say this, they’ve got their work cut out, no doubt. Nobody’s irreplaceable. No talent, no executive, nobody’s irreplaceable in this industry. That being said, what is their plan in place? That’s what I’ve yet to hear. Who is the wrestling guy [that will replace D’Amore?] I think that at the end of the day, that is an enormous component of who is steering the ship creatively. I wish [new TNA President] Anthony Cicione well. It just surprised me, the timing of everything.”

Transcript h/t: Fightful.com

Misc. Wrestling News & Notes

New Japan Pro Wrestling and Stardom’s parent company Bushiroad’s stock suffered a 17.78% drop in value following Wednesday’s trading hours ending at $370 yen ($2.46) per share. This resulted in Bushiroad’s stock price hitting an all-time low level and was caused following the negative stock market reaction towards the poor results from their recent fiscal quarter report. Adding to Bushiroad’s stock woes was the Japanese Yen dropping to its lowest level against the U.S. Dollar in over 33 years.

Former WCW wrestler and NFL player Steve “Mongo” McMichael was announced last week to be among this year’s class of inductees for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In a recent episode of ESPN’s NFL Countdown, ESPN aired a feature honoring McMichael’s upcoming Hall of Fame induction and his battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

As noted before, TNA Wrestling brought back their TNA Xplosion series for TNA+ streaming service and YouTube channel. PWInsider’s Mike Johnson reported that his sources stated that Anthem and TNA officials currently do not have any plans for episodes of Xplosion to air on AXS TV.

Crunchyroll recently announced that Mercedes Mone will be among the celebrities awards presenters at their upcoming 2024 Crunchyroll Anime Awards event on March 2nd in Tokyo, Japan.

Tuesday’s NWA Powerrr show featured Max The Impaler defeating Mims in a NWA World Television and NWA Women’s World Television Championships Unification match to become the new Unified NWA World TV Champion. Max The Impaler also created history in the process becoming the first non-binary wrestler to win the NWA World TV title in NWA history.

WrestleCon recently announced that Matt Hardy will be making an appearance company at their WrestleCon 2024 convention on April 5th in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was announced that Hardy will be holding a live episode of his The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy podcast at the event.

WrestleCon recently announced the first official match for the card of their 2024 Mark Hitchcock Memorial Supershow on April 4th in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

Rob Van Dam vs. “Speedball” Mike Bailey

Game Changer Wrestling recently announced that The Bollywood Boyz (Gurvinder & Harvinder Shira) will be making an appearance for the company at their Touch The Sky event on February 23rd in Dallas, Texas

GCW also recently announced one new match for the card of their Touch The Sky event on February 23rd in Dallas: