NWA Owner and Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has disclosed that before he bought the National Wrestling Alliance it had been offered to plenty of prospective buyers including WWE, who turned down the chance to own it.
Corgan bought the NWA in 2017 under the auspices of his Lightning One Inc. after an ill-fated stint for the rock star in IMPACT Wrestling. Speaking to Chris Jericho on his Talk Is Jericho podcast, Corgan discussed his decision to buy the NWA and how the company that had once been the standard-bearer of the wrestling industry had been devalued to the point of being shopped around for a buyer.
Corgan divulged:
“I’m proud to carry the mantle of the business in this way. It’s a very specific thing, and of course, the business is far different than it was in the heyday of the NWA. There’s no pretend there. When I bought the NWA and that was coming out of the whole situation with TNA and the debacle and lawsuits, and there was a lot of kind of public acrimony there.”
“And then I purchased NWA. Crazily enough, it was owned by one person. It was so devalued. He tried to sell it to everybody. Nobody wanted it, as far as I know. He certainly offered it to WWE. They thought it was so worthless that they didn’t even just buy it just to take it off the market.”
After many years in the wilderness, there were many in wrestling skeptical of what Billy Corgan was actually buying with his purchase, including the man who would appear on commentary briefly for the rejuvenated brand.
For Corgan though, it was all about the history of the National Wrestling Alliance:
“Then when I bought it, Jim Cornette and other people, and I loved Jim. ‘What the hell did he buy? He might as well have bought air. He bought three worthless letters.’ A lot of that type of stuff and certainly I sat around at one point and thought, ‘Well, if I started, Billy Corgan Wrestling or SP Wrestling’, and I thought, no, I want the history. I’ll take that history. I’ll take that on. I like the challenge of that.”
The NWA recently crowned a new NWA Women’s Worlds Champion when the impressive Kamille defeated Serena Deeb at the When Our Shadows Fall pay-per-view.