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At 1 PM Central today in the Chancery Court of Davidson County in Nashville, TN the short-term future and potentially, the existence of TNA Impact Wrestling could be decided.
A hearing before Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle in the lawsuit Billy Corgan, the company's current President, has brought against Impact Wrestling, its parent company Impact Ventures, its Chairwoman and former President Dixie Carter, Chief Financial Officer Dean Broadhead and Serg Salinas will determine whether Corgan received a temporary injunction that would prevent any of the defendants from doing any business for the company without Corgan's approval as well as prevent everyone from trying to sell the company or its assets, including the tape library, which to be fair, is truly the only asset the company has.
It is also possible, although not probable, that based on everything that has been submitted to the court, Hobbs Lyle could rule that Corgan does indeed have Carter's voting rights and ownership of the company. It's conceivable that today could be the final day that anyone from the Carter family has ownership in the company, although a more likely scenario is that this turns into a long, drawn out court battle.
That means more money spent by each side on a company that is, at the best, hurting terribly financially and at the worst, insolvent. So, everyone is fighting for something that, as of right now, is legitimately a black hole of money.
It certainly does appear that settlement is not the strategy here on either side. Common sense would dictate that the defendants would have wanted the settlement to take place before the company would be further embarrassed by the allegations Corgan brought forth that were publicly revealed yesterday. Now is too late. The financial peril of the company, which was never really in doubt, has now been exposed for everyone to see in black and white - and that has to not only make the creditors scared to death they are never seeing their money but also has to make any new potential suitors and partners extremely wary.
If Corgan was just looking to settle so he could go back to his musical pursuits, the strongest leverage he had for that was over the last few days. Plus, just a week or so ago, Anthem Media made it clear they were willing to pay Corgan back his money to go away and that they were willing to step in and finance the company - is that still the case now that the company has all this egg on its face? There's no way to know that before the hearing.
Even if the lawsuit gets thrown out today and the Judge rules Corgan's claims are baseless, TNA is still left in the middle of a financial Sharknado the likes of which no wrestling company has ever survived. Even if the chess board is set back to the first move today, what does TNA do to move forward and try to exist without being trapped in the "upside down" of their financial mess?
Stranger things have certainly happened in this world, but when you look at the history of pro wrestling, everyone from Jim Crockett to Paul Heyman tapped out under the weight of financial losses...and if TNA needed Billy Corgan to save them not once, but three times from foreclosure to Aroluxe, what happens if he's out of the picture? Anthem becomes the new angel investor, perhaps, but for how long? Does Aroluxe foreclose, and if they don't, then what?
I've written this before, but what is the end game here for TNA as a company? It's not as if companies can't be turned around. Go look at Marvel Comics and where it was in the 1990s and think about where it is now as a huge movie studio that is part of the Disney machine - things can change, but management has to be smart and smart, hard moves have to be made. It's a grueling process, but thus far, we haven't seen any evidence that anything but barely holding on as the company swings from investor to investor as if they are jungle vines is the strategy, and quite frankly, that should scare the sh** out of everyone working there that it has come to that. It's sad, but based on where we are, it's the truth.
Flipping the hourglass, if Corgan is awarded the rights to control the business end of the company, even temporarily as this legal process goes down the yellow brick road to judgment, what now? Will Corgan have the time to devote his full attention to running TNA and trying to extricate it from the muck that has bogged it down for seemingly forever? Is there even a way to financially elevate the company out of the debts that we are aware of, not to mention the ones that are probably not known publicly as the doors to the hearing open?
The fact Corgan has yet to settle certainly lends credence to the argument that he wants to own TNA, but once he owns it, what exactly will he own and then what does he do with it? How much money is he personally willing to sink into this if in the end of this battle, TNA is now Corgan Wrestling? Surely, going out and playing music has to be a hell of a lot less stressful, right?
In the center of all of this is a talented crew of wrestlers, many of whom I felt like I was trying to talk out of jumping off a bridge last night when they reached out. Not even a month ago, Dixie Carter was trying to allay their fears in a locker room meeting and now they are worried they won't even get paid for the last set of tapings, much less have bookings come January. The fact that checks for the tapings, expected to arrive this week, have yet to arrive, has only served to add to the worry. The black and white of that lawsuit, even redacted, hit the roster harder than any steel chair could.
Make no doubt about it though, that hard hit also reverberated for Dixie Carter and the rest of TNA management. All of the sins and all of the mistakes and all of the ripple effects of past decisions are laid out for the world to see. All they are protected from, as of this writing, is exactly how much money has been spent and loss in the process - and that could always come out down the line.
I wrote several weeks that Dixie Carter was trapped in the trash compactor on the Death Star with the walls closing in. Today, that has never been a truer statement, except because unlike Luke Skywalker, there's no C-3PO and R2-D2 to call out to for help. If there was, her parents and Panda Energy could have swooped in with the Millennium Falcon a long time ago and saved the day.
That hasn't happened and now the day has led to a courtroom, one in which Carter and perhaps even TNA, face their D-Day. Exactly what the damage will be, today, tomorrow and in the weeks to come, remain to be seen, but one things is obvious....today, the walls close in.
Mike Johnson can be reached at MikeJohnsonPWInsider@gmail.com.
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