Kurt Angle Explains Why TNA IMPACT Failed On Monday Nights Against WWE Raw

2010 was meant to be the dawn of the second Monday Night Wars, with TNA moving IMPACT to Mondays in a bid to battle WWE Raw and light a fire under a stagnant professional wrestling scene.

The move was ultimately a bad one, as WWE trounced TNA, with the move to Mondays alienating many longtime TNA fans and setting the company back several years.

One person at the centre of the wars was Kurt Angle, and the TNA Hall of Famer said the following about Monday IMPACT during a recent edition of the Kurt Angle Show podcast:

“I was excited about it, to be honest with you. I was really excited because I wanted to compete with WWE, but we learned very quickly that you cannot compete with WWE if you don’t have the money available. TNA had money, but they didn’t have the money that WWE had so it was really hard to compete against WWE. And I’ll give you an example: [Hulk] Hogan and [Eric] Bischoff wanted us to rent bigger venues, so we had to pay for those up front. And those bigger venues, they were for house shows, not even TV. Some of them were TV, and some of them were house shows. But they wanted to rent these out, and it’s a lot more expensive. So now we’re booking all these shows all over the country, and we have to put up the deposit. It’s a good bit of money,” revealed Angle.

Angle continued, noting where he thinks TNA went wrong:

“I just think that we did everything really too quickly. I think maybe we should start with Monday night with your TVs [in] bigger arenas. But we did it all really quickly, and it was just too much.

“That first Monday, I mean, it was our best rating ever. We were consistently doing about 2 million a week at that particular time. So I’d say that was the highest peak in our company’s history. I think that we had the highest ratings at that particular time. And I think that’s the only time that we could probably take a chance and try to go up against WWE. But it didn’t didn’t work out. And I told Dixie, ‘Listen, back off, back away. That’s it. You don’t have to be number one. It’s okay to be number two, especially where we were in this,’” said Angle.

IMPACT moved back to Thursday nights in May 2010 after a two-month run on Monday nights.

H/T: 411Mania