Pro-wrestling star and former NWA champion Jax Dane was a recent guest on the Shining Wizards Wrestling podcast to discuss a variety of subjects, including his run in IMPACT, his relationship with Tim Storm, and his reign with the 10 pounds of gold. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
His run as NWA champion and dropping the belt to Tim Storm:
You’re on top of the food chain at that point. You’re the great white shark swimming in the ocean. Nick Aldis is doing a fantastic job. Cody Rhodes did a fantastic job reenergizing, revitalizing that championship. And the person we can’t forget in all of this, in between the Funk regime and what’s going on with Billy Corgan is Tim Storm. Tim Storm was the perfect guy in the perfect position at the perfect time. Fans loved him during the transition. They love him now. He’s everything that an NWA world champion should be and should have been. So you take those guys, and you mesh them together, and Tim was the perfect torch bearer from one regime to the next. He’s still a huge part of what the NWA is doing. I lost the NWA world championship to him, so I have a ton of respect for him. When you peel away all the layers of wrestling, Tim Storm is one of my favorite people and favorite opponents, and one of my better friends in the wrestling business.
Looks back on his time in IMPACT:
It was cool man, but where I really, really struggled with that, and it took a lot of convincing from Abyss and Jeff Jarrett and Crimson. They had me billed as a former soldier. And I come from a military family. Both my uncles served in the military, and I have a lot of close friends that are military, whether it be marines or army, what have you. And I didn’t serve. So, they had me billed as a former soldier right, and I really struggled with being comfortable with that. Not so much with the role on TV, because that’s one thing. But when you do the meet and greets or you do the independent shows and you have fans and former soldiers thanking you for service and you know that you didn’t serve, even though you’re playing a role, man, that turned my stomach. It did. No fault to IMPACT whatsoever. Because they were justified in where they were on that decision. Just for me, I never did get comfortable being billed as a former soldier. I have too much respect for the military and what goes on. Crimson really had to talk me through being ok with that. Outside of that caveat, to the time we spent at IMPACT, I had a great time. Those guys there, LAX, Ortiz and Santana. Fantastic dudes to work with. Homicide was there in some form or fashion. Low Ki was there. You go down the list of the dudes that were there, man, it was a lot of fun to be there. Eddie Kingston was around, so my time at IMPACT was fantastic, except for being billed as a former soldier. And that’s just something I wasn’t comfortable portraying and it was hard to do, man.
How he felt in the NWA locker room:
It’s super cool man. Because a handful of those guys – Aaron Stevens and Chris Masters, and Pope – we all started in OVW together around the same time. A lot of people don’t know that. But I was there for a couple years before my mom got sick. So, Pope, Aaron Stevens, and Chris Masters were in the WWE class with me even though I wasn’t signed, I was in the class with them. Being reunited with those three guys alone is really cool for me because I get to see my old friends, right? But then when you get outside of a couple of these guys… What’s funny is, social media has the ability, and it’s not just in wrestling. It’s in basketball, it’s in football, and it’s in baseball. All of these players, and all of these performers… You get a feel for who they are way before you ever meet them. You got guys like Parrow and Kratos, and Trevor Murdoch, and you’re going into locker rooms with these guys, and you may have never met them but you feel like you know them because you’re online with them all the time, so when you do finally meet them, they’re just an extension of basically what their social media seems to be. You’re not walking into not knowing these guys. You’re pretty comfortable with them. And in most cases, man, I can’t think of any one person that’s turned out to be not as advertised down in the NWA. It’s been pretty cool since I’ve been there.