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Hey Cagesiders, hope you're enjoying your weekend. I thought I'd quickly pass along this amusing quote by Dana White about Dixie Carter and Spike TV as a pay-per-view platform taken from this week's Wrestling Observer Newsletter:
"You know Dixie from TNA. They love Dixie at Spike. She worked her ass off to build her business. I have nothing negative to say about her. They were on Spike. They get 1.8 million viewers and they can’t sell a PPV."
The context of this double-edged praise was White discussing, with Dave Meltzer, Eddie Alvarez's ongoing legal dispute with the Viacom owned Bellator.
Alvarez wants to jump ship to UFC, but Bellator has the rights to match UFC's offer and copied their contract almost verbatim, only replacing all mentions of Fox with Spike TV.
On Jan. 25th, Judge Jose Linares of U.S. District Court in New Jersey ruled against Alvarez in his attempt to get an injunction that would allow him to immediately sign a UFC contract and debut on UFC 159 headlined by a Light Heavyweight title match between champion Jon Jones and Chael Sonnen in late April.
The contention is that Spike TV and Fox are not equivalent television platforms and it would be impossible for Bellator, who have never held a pay-per-view event before, to garner 200,000 buys on PPV, which is where Alvarez's PPV bonus would start kicking in, while UFC 159 will likely sell three to four times that amount.
However, the clueless Dixie Carter is the worst person on the planet to cite for White to make the case that it was "ridiculous" for Linares to rule against Alvarez. Carter's complete and utter inability as a promoter to use television to entice viewers to pay to see her product is exposed by the fact that TNA's buy rates today are much lower than they were when Impact Wrestling aired on the much lower rated Fox Sports Net.
Indeed, just recently Carter cut down from running 12 PPVs a year to just four, not because Spike TV is such a terrible station, but due to her own incompetence, and those that work around her.
I might have bought it, if only Dana had argued that Bjorn Rebney is a bigger numbskull than even Dixie was, is and probably ever will be.