Tommy Dreamer Interview: IMPACT's Resurgence, Victory Road, His Career & More

Wednesday was National Podcasting Day, and in addition to doing the House of Hardcore Podcast for a little while now, you've been involved in social media for a long time and even had your own YouTube show for a time back in 2011. How much have you seen social media help or hurt the wrestling world in the last decade either with yourself or just in general?

Dreamer: The good is that it gets more eyes on the product. I can gauge or deem what people like through social media. It's almost like you have your market research right then and there. You can also see a definite correlation with ratings. You've got Retribution. Everybody has crapped all over Retribution and ratings have dropped. If you really think about what social media should be for and what the wrestling business is, it's about promotion. “Hey, I'm going to be wrestling this Saturday at Victory Road.” That, for me, is how it should be. We're wrestlers and we want to promote ourselves. It allows fans to see the product. When there was more independent wrestling out there or when IMPACT had more live events, come see the show. The negatives, when I grew up, wrestling magazines accentuated storylines. It was all positive, positive, positive. Now, you can have an influx of negative and some people view that as truth. That's not always the case. There's always two to three sides to every story, but I see things spin out there and I'm like, “How is this even possible if I know the real story?”

There's a lot of haters and there's a lot of people out there who want to break people down. I'm one of those people who choose to build people and products up. I work on a radio show on SiriusXM and I don't rip things up because that's not the type of person I am. I always go and try to find the positives in a lot of things. You're doing things this way, but what about trying it that way? With social media, you can get that gauge. With me, too. I recently had Shannon Moore on my show and Shannon Moore had a two-thousand-dollar-a-day heroin addiction that nobody knew about. You know how many of his friends contacted me and said, “I feel broken, why didn't he contact me?” I was like, “I don't know, call him up. He's a totally different person.” For my podcast, if you want to hate on the WWE, cool, don't watch it. But WWE saved my friend's life and now he goes out there and saves other people's lives. He helps people with their addictions and he's clean and sober and loving every aspect of his life. It's good to tell those stories, too.

In the last few years alone, you've done work with practically every major company here in the States from IMPACT to WWE to to NXT to Ring Of Honor to AEW to even Lucha Underground at one point. How do you manage to keep a higher profile than almost anyone else even at this stage of your career and what drives you in addition to still loving the business?

Dreamer: I always treated people how I wanted to be treated myself. In our business, I've always been honest. At times, that does hurt you because some people don't want to hear honesty, but I've always had good, open relationships with everybody. If you tell me exactly how this is going to go on, then cool, I'll continue to do business with you. That's just how I've always maintained that. For a while, I was trying to be a modern-day Terry Funk where I'd just show up everywhere. It does help your value, but it's also doing it when it's right or when a company needed it.

Even with IMPACT, I've been friends with Scott D'Amore and Don Callis. They were like, “Hey, man, you want to come in for a few shots?” Then it turned into, “Hey, can you help behind the scenes?” That's all I've been doing since ECW. Like you said, I love it. On 28 October, I'll be wrestling 31 years. The last TV tapings I had five matches in four days and I felt every bit of almost 50. What drives me is that I know I'm almost at the end and I'm already at those years of when it can end at any time, so I'm just trying to get the most of it. I really do think about what Terry Funk did for ECW and for the wrestling fans. He was in his 50s. He was 55 when he did a moonsault to the floor, his first one ever. I think about that and if I continue to go out there and not embarrass myself and perform at a pretty high level, I'm going to keep on doing it.