Paul Heyman offers an account of his negotiations with TNA and Spike from 2010

Paul Heyman hit a lot of the familiar topics in his recent chat with Ring Rust Radio - Brock Lesnar, John Cena, his new DVD from WWE.

One area he hasn't covered as much recently, but that has an extremely relevant connection to a current pro wrestling discussion, is his negotiations with TNA about taking over Creative, and more, for the company back at the start of this decade.

For the first time (that I can recall hearing, anyway) he's very specific about Viacom-owned Spike's role and the Carter family's particular objections.

Check it out:

In 2010, after Brock Lesnar choked out Shane Carwin, there was a discussion that I had with TNA that involved Spike TV. Ultimately, because TNA had been trying to get me on the phone from the day I left WWE in 2006 and I never took the phone call. We finally got into a conversation because Spike TV had reached out to make that happen.

Ultimately, the story of this is, if I was going to do it, I wanted the Dana White deal. I wanted complete control, I wanted a piece of the company and I wanted the ability to, when the time was right, to take it public. I wanted to do the programming completely different than the way they had been doing it and Spike TV signed off on it. The concept was a very youth-oriented, youth-based, youth-marketed promotion. A complete contrast to the way WWE does things. A complete and utter alternative to WWE at the time.

While the ruling family in TNA had no problem with my salary request, my ownership demands, my concepts, etc. etc., they didn't want to implement as much of a youth-oriented product as I was looking for and I balked at it. I have no regrets about that. At the end of the day, they were happier being a WWE-lite promotion than they were branding themselves something different as TNA.

So that was the last flirtation I had with doing my own thing...In regard to doing my own thing in sports entertainment, I kinda do my own thing now with Brock Lesnar and I'm very happy doing it.

Running a whole show is a 24/7 and 365 commitment, and you would need an enormous amount of financing and very strong distribution set up front to get me to the table to even consider such a task. Otherwise, it's doomed to fail.

What do you think, Cagesiders?  Bad move for TNA to not have given Heyman what he wanted?  Or by Spike to not push harder?

What would the pro wrestling world look like in 2014 if Paul had been running Impact for the last four years?