NWA President Billy Corgan recently spoke with Ariel Helwani to promote this weekend’s two-night 74th Anniversary pay-per-view, where Corgan also discussed a number of additional topics, including how Paul Heyman once offered him 10% of ECW prior to them going out of business. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
How Heyman wanted him to invest in ECW but he knew how much debt they were in:
The backstory is, I was friendly with a lot of the wrestlers, so I knew how much money Heyman owed the wrestlers. Somebody who was my go-between for Heyman and I said ‘he wants to have dinner with you.’ He took me out to a deli in New York. I got the whole vintage Paul Heyman cutting promos to little ol’ Billy Corgan at the deli counter, basically saying, ‘how would you like to be an investor in ECW?’ I said, ‘How much?’ ‘A million dollars.’ ‘What do I get for my million dollars?’ ‘10%.’ ‘Paul, I can do math, and I know ECW is not worth $10 million.’ Of course, I didn’t tell him I knew how much debt ECW was in. The only thing I look back on that story on is, it wasn’t too long after that where ECW went out of business and the McMahons took it over.
On the McMahons buying WCW at such a cheap price:
It would have been funny if I had actually bought 10% because I would have been in a position to negotiate with the McMahons at that point. It was never approached to me like that. At the end of the day, it became a forgone conclusion that the most money he was going to get was from WWE. I do look back and wish I had gotten a little more involved in the WCW sale. I think the McMahons bought it for something like $4 million. I would have lost any bidding war against the McMahons, but I would have been very interested in that if it was for sale for that cheap, I just didn’t realize it was that cheap for sale. I heard about it and I had a lot of inside knowledge at that point and people were telling me, but I wouldn’t have known who to call, ‘Hey, I want to buy WCW.’ I do think it’s a bit of a crime, and I say this gently, that WCW has never been revived. Obviously, Vince McMahon didn’t want it to happen or it would have happened. It’s a shame for people who were WCW fans that they never got to have that other moment. I do regret that because I was a fan of that product.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful
)