Wrestling's New Golden Age by Ronald Snyder

Author:Ronald Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Building a Brand

THERE IS NOT AN AREA of the wrestling business Jeff Jarrett is not familiar with. The Tennessee native literally grew up in professional wrestling. Jarrett is a third-generation wrestler, following in the footsteps of his father, Jerry Jarrett, and his maternal grandfather, Eddie Marlin. Even his grandmother worked in the wrestling business.

Jerry Jarrett went onto become the promotor for the Memphis territory, known as the Continental Wrestling Association. It was one of the hotter territories in the 1970s into the 1980s, with weekly shows at the Mid-South Coliseum and a highly-rated weekly Saturday show on WMC-TV.

The territory is probably best known for the feud between Jerry “the King” Lawler and actor Andy Kaufman in 1982, which garnered national headlines—especially with their infamous late night talk show appearance with David Letterman. The CWA would eventually form a partnership in the late 1980s with the AWA and then with World Class Championship Wrestling, leading to the failed Superclash III event in 1988. Following conflicts with Verne Gagne after the event, Jerry Jarrett went on to purchase and combine his promotion with World Class to form the USWA, a company many consider wrestling’s last full-time territory.

Jeff Jarrett got his start at the age of eighteen when he began as a referee with the CWA. Jarrett would go on to wrestle for the AWA and USWA before moving on to the WWE and WCW. Over the course of his career, Jarrett has won nearly 80 titles, including four WCW world heavyweight title and six WWE Intercontinental title reigns. Jarrett was with WCW when it was bought by WWE and was not one of the wrestlers brought over by McMahon.

So, with no other major wrestling promotion around, the Jarretts returned to their roots and launched NWA: Total Nonstop Action wrestling. Jarrett was a centerpiece of TNA for more than a decade as a wrestler, promoter, and executive. He helped guide the company through its infancy with weekly pay-per-views to its TV deal on Spike TV in 2005, giving wrestling fans an alternative national show to the WWE for the first time since 2001.

Jarrett navigated this while also enduring personal loss, as his first wife and mother of his three children, Jill, died of breast cancer in 2007. Three years later, Jarrett remarried. His wife, Karen, was previously married to former WWE and TNA wrestler and Hall of Famer Kurt Angle. By 2014, Jarrett had resigned from TNA after his efforts to purchase the company from Panda Energy, which had purchased a majority stake in the promotion in October 2002, failed.

This left Jarrett back at square one. Just like when he formed TNA a dozen years earlier, he knew he would need to take a non-traditional approach to building a wrestling company. Enter Global Force Wrestling.

Beginning in 2014, Jarrett has been promoting the Global Force Wrestling brand and developing partnerships both nationally and internationally. His roster of wrestlers included GFW champion Nick Aldis (the wrestler formally known as Magnus in TNA), the GFW Next Gen champion Cody Rhodes, and women’s champion Christina Von Eerie.

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