Austin Aries was the guest on today’s edition of Busted Open Radio on SiriusXM and he openly talked about what went wrong with his TNA Championship reign a few years ago.
“I guess as frank as I can say it … somebody dropped the ball, and it wasn’t me. I was ready to run with it and somebody knocked it out of my hands from behind. I’m not sure where the decision was made, but I agree with your assessment and I think a lot of people agree with that assessment [that TNA had red hot momentum when they put the title on Aries]. You know, sometimes you have too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. At that time, that could have been the case of what was going on. You have different people fighting for different directions. All I wanted to do was to go on television every week and have the best… wrestling match of any company, anywhere.”
For anyone that wasn’t watching at the time, Aries was the most over guy in the company during this time period. It was a no brainer for TNA to give him the strap. Then only a few months after he won the title, TNA turned him heel to face off against a returning Jeff Hardy who defeated Aries to win the belt.
“That’s really all I wanted … was the opportunity to succeed or fail on my own. But plans change. Jeff Hardy came in … no one is going to discount Jeff Hardy and what he brings to the industry with his name value, his name recognition … so it had nothing to do with Jeff personally, I just felt like I didn’t get the opportunity to really help the company to the best of my abilities.”
