Jeff Jarrett: I Knew With TNA That I Had No Interest In Going The WWE Direction Of Women’s Wrestling At The Time

Jeff Jarrett discusses women’s wrestling in TNA, noting that he knew at the time he didn’t want to go the WWE direction of eye candy.

In the late 90s to the early to mid 2000s, WWE would have a combination of women’s wrestlers being used as eye candy while trying to maintain active competition within the division, but leaned further into the eye candy point up until the women’s revolution in the mid 2010s. For TNA, Jeff Jarrett knew from the get go he wanted to go another direction.

While speaking to The Wrestling Classic in a new interview, Jeff Jarrett spoke about women’s wrestling in TNA, noting that he knew from the beginning he did not want to go the WWE route with the Knockouts.

“It means a lot. There is a guy by the name of Mr. Cavazzini, Michael Cavazzini in Philly. He is a doctor. He did a thesis. He did a study. It went really deep into this, Justin. It’s very cool for him to kind of dial into the DNA of that. But I think back to Gail Kim. ‘Jeff, I want to wrestle. I want to wrestle.’ ‘Gail, we’ve got to create the division. We can’t rush this. It’s got to come along.’ I think about the many conversations, and shout out to Dutch Mantell, Dutch having the patience to think through in the process of Gail versus Kong, I think of The Beautiful People, ODB, all the different players that came with that division. They were, you know, 8 10, 12 girls that all had distinct personalities. It really is. Obviously the X-Division is, is a huge calling card, but I knew at the time, on the other channel, as they say, you know, on WWE, bra and panty, diva, that was what they represented, and I knew that I had no interest in going that direction. I wanted to create a women’s division that is athletically based, competitively based, given the right perspective and the right time and the right placement in the main event when it made sense, and we did that. It’s something that I, to this day, very, very proud of, of all the work we did as a team, both in front of the camera and behind as well.”

Elsewhere in another recent interview, Jeff spoke about the recent episodes of Dark Side Of The Ring that covered TNA’s early years. You can read more about that here.

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