Billy Corgan Reveals His Original Plan To Rename TNA Wrestling

2016 was a turbulent year for TNA Wrestling, with Billy Corgan taking over as the promotion's president in August of that year. The Smashing Pumpkins frontman wouldn't be in management for long, though, and he departed the company in November 2016.

Renaming the promotion as IMPACT Wrestling was discussed while Corgan was in TNA management and the now-NWA owner revealed his original plan to rebrand the company on One-On-One With Jon Alba. 

"This is reality now. I'm trying to do a hostile takeover at TNA. They got a bunch of my money, and based on the legal documents I have, I'm now running TNA, not only legally, but literally because it's my money keeping the company alive. Where this thing was going to go, we started talking about, well, what are we going to do because for years they've been talking about getting rid of the TNA name. If you look at the workers who were there at that time, Drew Galloway, Bobby Lashley, Matt and Jeff Hardy, Decay, Eli Drake, EC3, it wasn't like you didn't have the horses to run. There was momentum coming off the Hardys' (Broken Universe)," Corgan began.

"So what I did is, there was supposed to be this scene where Matt's in a rowboat, and it's the morning on the lake, and you would see him rowing out there. Then he would pick up the TNA title and he was going to throw it in the water. The idea was then the company would change names. Through the process of him throwing the TNA title in the lake, he would either bring out the new title, or that would be the setup, and then when we came back running again, you would have a new name for the company, and the Hardys were going to be the vehicle by which there was going be this transformation of the company," he continued.

"Then we talked about even better, you can do an invasion angle with people who want to keep it TNA and do a whole intercompany battle. Then maybe even Dixie (Carter) is involved in one side, and I'm involved in the other. My whole argument was, while we're fighting for control, we might as well turn it into a television product because we might as well take all this squabbling behind the scenes and put it in front of the camera and actually do some business. It just never got there." 

Following Corgan's departure from TNA, Anthem would buy a majority stake in the promotion and TNA Wrestling would be renamed IMPACT Wrestling in early 2017. 

H/T to WrestlingNews.co