Scott D'Amore On Releasing Alberto El Patron, Impact Doing Things WWE Cannot, Gaining Fans' Trust
Impact Wrestling Executive Scott D'Amore spoke with Sport Illustrated's "Extra Mustard" section about his vision for the company, releasing Alberto El Patron, and gaining the fans' trust. Here are some of the highlights:
Releasing Alberto El Patron after he no-showed a Lucha Underground vs. Impact Wrestling Twitch event:
"It was obviously an unfortunate situation. When Alberto failed to show up to the event, we made our decision on a new main event for the show. It was important for us to give our fans, in a capacity crowd at the Sugar Mill in New Orleans, a great event, and we did not want them to focus on someone who wasn't there. We wanted them to focus on the match we were giving. Those three guys went out, were so professional, and put on an amazing match. Then we sat down and huddled."
Getting fans interested in Impact Wrestling again:
"One of the things we need to do as a company is build trust. We need the fans to know that when we say we are going to deliver something, that we'll deliver it. We did not feel good about advertising something and not delivering it, and we were not going to put ourselves in a situation where that could happen again at Redemption. We saw a match that had people buzzing with the live crowd and had feedback through the roof on our live Twitch broadcast, and we decided to go with that as a rematch for our pay-per-view main event. Austin Aries, Pentagon, and Fenix squaring off in a three-way for the world title gives us a great main event on top of an outstanding card."
His vision for how Impact Wrestling should be portrayed:
"Taking an athletic, modern-style product and applying some good old-fashioned storytelling to it. We can have more of a guerrilla approach and be more gritty. We can do some things that WWE is never going to do because they have such a high standard of production and it's just not going to work for them."
D'Amore also discussed being more open to work with other companies and using Twitch as a means to gather new fans. You can check out the full interview by clicking here.