From 2002 to 2016, Dixie Carter was the President of TNA (now known as Impact Wrestling), a tenure full of ups and downs -- or, if you ask the average pro wrestling fan, mostly downs. The promotion had a rocky start, but eventually found its footing, offering potential competition for WWE until various missteps turned it into an easy punchline for the Internet Wrestling Community.
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If there’s one area where Total Nonstop Action competently competed with World Wrestling Entertainment, it was when it came to stories of the behind-the-scenes goings on in the company. With that in mind, here are 10 Total Nonstop anecdotes about Dixie Carter that we find it hard to believe!
10 Buying TNA
Some fans may think they know Dixie Carter but don’t know how she got involved with the wrestling business. In the early days of TNA, Dixie Carter was the head of a PR firm called Trifecta Entertainment, and TNA was one of their clients. Soon after TNA started, it was in financial shambles for way too many reasons to get into here, but Carter stepped in and brokered a deal between TNA and her parents’ company, Panda Energy, to buy a stake in the company.
9 People Believed Her Affair with AJ Styles Was Real
One of the most reviled storylines in TNA history is the Claire Lynch debacle, where a feud between Christopher Daniels and AJ Styles was saddled with weird melodrama involving a pregnant drug addict who may or may not be carrying AJ’s baby. Originally the angle was about Daniels uncovering an affair between Styles and Dixie Carter, but they had to pivot to something else when Dixie’s parents started getting weird questions from their country club friends who believed it was real.
8 The Jarrett/Angle Thing
Fans might remember Jeff Jarrett and Kurt Angle having a feud that involved Angle’s wife Karen having an affair with Jarrett, but maybe some are unaware that it was based in truth. Even fewer know that it had major backstage consequences.
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Reportedly, the Dixie Carter had a bad reaction to this, sending Jarrett on a leave of absence. She’d ultimately oust him from the company, along with many Jarrett loyalists, who turned out to be some of the more competent people working backstage.
7 She Was Very Excited to Meet Hulk Hogan
Before he worked for TNA, Hulk Hogan once visited the Impact Zone just to hang out and say hello to some friends, and Dixie Carter stopped by to meet the Hulkster. According to Vince Russo, who worked for the company at the time, when Carter met Hogan, she was ridiculously jazzed, to the degree that Russo was sure she’d be willing to pay Hogan whatever he wanted to work for the company. Which she did.
6 She Tried to Hire Jim Ross
One of the most beloved commentators of all time, Jim Ross was also a huge backstage force during WWE’s heyday in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2009, Dixie Carter tried to convince Ross to join TNA in a major backstage capacity, going as far as inviting him to spend a day with the whole Carter family, including Dixie’s parents. Ross made a great impression, but the two parties couldn’t agree on a basic term: if they were making JR responsible for TNA’s success, he wanted to control what wrestlers were on his roster.
5 Meeting Shelton Benjamin But Messing Up His Name
Fans would often question Dixie Carter’s actual knowledge of wrestling, considering she was someone with a lot of power who may not have been a “fan” since birth like they were. So, for them, stories like this one may feel like vindication of those beliefs. According to Taz on his podcast, The Taz Show, after TNA and WWE talent all hung out at a bar in Orlando, Dixie Carter remarked that she was excited to meet all these WWE guys she never met before, including “Benjamin Shelton.”
4 She Didn’t Know What Kayfabe Was
Here’s another story about Dixie’s wrestling knowledge. In 2016, Vince Russo shared a story about being at dinner with some TNA backstage guys around 2010, when someone got a call from Dixie Carter. When Russo was handed the phone, Carter was apparently angry because she ran into Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff, who used the word “kayfabe” a bunch of times.
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Russo was confused about why she didn’t call him directly, but it turned out that she called the first guy so she could ask him what “kayfabe” meant.
3 Insulting Destination America
TNA wasn’t doing great, but it had a good thing going with Spike TV, a cable TV channel available on many, if not most, providers. However, Spike would end up cancelling TNA Impact in 2014, forcing the company to find a new home, a harder-to-find channel called Destination America, in 2015. This new deal wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, and Dixie Carter made matters worse by calling Destination America a bunch of “dummies” in an email that the network’s boss was accidentally copied on.
2 Her English Cousin
In 2019, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly -- the English comedian/TV host duo known as Ant & Dec -- starred in a show called Ant & Dec’s DNA Journey, where the pair trace their genealogy and discover lost family members. The biggest revelation was that the pair are actually very distant cousins thanks to a Viking ancestor, but the most relevant revelation here is that Donnelly discovered that he’s cousins with Dixie Carter.
1 She Got Injured From That Table Spot
In 2014, TNA did some shows at the Manhattan Center -- a legendary venue for ECW shows -- and delivered a moment geared to please old ECW loyalists: a Dudley Boy powerbombing the boss of TNA through a table. That moment came with a price, however, as Dixie Carter suffered some fractured vertebrae and a broken rib. That said, Carter ultimately felt that it was worth doing, as it got a huge reaction.
NEXT: TNA: 5 Times Dixie Carter Was The Craziest Owner In Wrestling (& 5 Times It Was Vince McMahon)
