Jeff Jarrett On If There Was Hesitation Give Samoa Joe the TNA World Title In 2008, Lockdown Becoming A Tentpole Event

On a recent episode of My World, Jeff Jarrett discussed TNA Lockdown 2008. Jarrett discussed the strategy of the big four pay-per-views in TNA and if there was any hesitation on putting the TNA World Championship on Samoa Joe at the time. Some highlights are below.

On Lockdown 2008 being a tentpole event for TNA: “For sure, we counter programmed, if you will, WrestleMania glitz and glamor and Hollywood and everything that goes with it and Lockdown was simplistic. It was going to be all steel cage format. The best way to say it is our marketing efforts were going to be counter programming. It wasn’t going to be slick and all that kind of stuff. It was brutality, cell violence, brutality, all the adjectives or descriptions that you want.”

“The simplistic is January, February, March and April are the best buying months of pay-per-view. It’s TV season people are more inside. It’s winter time. The weather breaks early-mid late April, so that’s the most lucrative buying months in the pay-per-view industry. Our anniversary show was our summer show. It didn’t want to go into July because that’s traditionally where SummerSlam was late July, early August so we took it June. It was legitimately June 19th, 2002 as we know was our very first event. So, it was our anniversary event and then we got into the fall just like the old slot that Halloween Havoc had and Halloween Havoc didn’t go up against Survivor Series the traditional Thanksgiving Day tradition. It went into October based around as the only October holiday, so to speak, Halloween and that’s where we placed our Bound For Glory so that’s in a nutshell kind of the strategy the marketing strategy of our big four at TNA at the time.”

On having any hesitation on putting the title on Samoa Joe: “Look, in reading the notes and doing my best recollection — we had all the confidence in the world that he was going to re-up, although it wasn’t signed on the dotted line. We integrated that into storylines, but at the end of the day once we got Joe rolling or he got himself rolling, or collectively we did and the undefeated streak and then the natural best out of three series against Kurt. We didn’t do everything right at TNA, that may be an understatement, but we showed our patience with Joe. He went on a year and half winning streak and then, who’s the best guy to break it? And they did the headbutt and we did money there. And then they had the rubber match and then we came back and all that went together.

“But, Joe, as a performer for us — and yes he had wrestled in Japan, Ring of Honor, but he had not come up through the WWE system. He checked all the boxes to be certainly AJ was with us from day one, but Joe was right up there and on the momentum. He checked every box that we possibly could create to be a homegrown star face of the company and so there were some speed bumps along the way, but Joe had it all. He had the entertainment component of it. He could talk. He could work. He could do it all and so we stayed the course and I’m glad that the notes showed all that it was six-nine months that we wanted to stay the course and eventually crown Joe the champion and this is the event we headed into and promoted it and what a great opponent and Kurt and the way he had been just not built, but just his persona and his in-ring work not just physical, but his mic skills. This was a really well built story that paid off.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit My World With Jeff Jarrett with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.