12 Questions For Shawn Daivari

7. On TNA

AS: Tell me a bit about your time in TNA.

SD: It was great when I got there. When I got there Jeff Jarrett was the guy. He was the Vince McMahon. We knew Dixie was the one financing things, but she wasn't involved in the day-to-day programming...hirings, firings the angles. She was involved in making deals with Spike. But Jeff was the end-all-be-all.

Dixie did stuff behind the scenes, so if she made a horrible decision it didn't affect the product really. That changed when I was there, and when that happened, based on the way my contract was structured I had just signed, was in effect for one month and it was great. In that one month Jeff was sent home, Dixie became involved with the actual product and Vince Russo was the head guy in charge of product. Terry Taylor was no longer booking the house shows, so my contract, which was great, was now garbage.

I'm not a mark. I could be the biggest jobber on the planet, I could be World Champ, it doesn't matter to me, but the way my contract was structured was Jeff had it in a way that Panda (the company that used to fund TNA) would be okay with it being very incentive based.

It was like the more I got established on the show and put in bigger programs, I would get paid more. And at that point Panda was cool with that, but what they weren't cool with was what ended up happening to a lot of guys, like Billy Gunn for example, they were paying him way too much to be a jobber. They were like 'we gotta let this guy go, his contract is for someone on top of the card.' So Jeff structured my contract in a way that the more over I got, the more they would pay me.