Bruce Prichard was Vince McMahon’s right-hand man once, and he was the head of talent relations and vice president of Programming for TNA for about 3 full years.
On his podcast Something To Wrestle on MLW Radio, Prichard told a story about payment issues in TNA that gives an insight into the notorious payment issues TNA is known for:
Prichard said that at one point, he was told that there were 5 wrestlers in TNA who hadn’t been paid for up to 3-4 weeks. His role at the time was handling the payroll, which he would subsequently turn in every week to the accounting department located in Dallas, Texas.
He was told by accounting that those cheques (with the assigned cheque numbers) were sent out on one particular day and he even got an email from them regarding this information. When he told the talent about it, they insisted that they had not received the cheques.
The accounting team in Dallas said that it must’ve been an issue with the talent’s post offices. Prichard went on to mention that the talents were from Tampa, San Francisco, and Los Angeles respectively, so it couldn’t possibly have been an issue with all of the post offices.
This delay of payment period went on for a couple of more weeks, making it up to six weeks that the talent had not gotten paid, and as a result, they said that they would not be able to make it to Orlando for the TV tapings.
Accounting still insisted that the cheques were sent out, and Prichard told accounting to stop all those cheques since they weren’t received yet. He then requested that they send new cheques overnight to Orlando, to which accounting responded that they couldn’t do it overnight, and they could only do it in two days by air.
When Prichard arrived for the next TV tapings, it appeared that the talent had somehow managed to make it.
They got their overnight money, because when Prichard arrived, three of the talents were waiting for him holding envelopes saying “look at this sh*t”. Inside the envelopes were the cheques with postmarks on them matching the ones that accounting sent to Prichard initially, thus signifying that the cheques were never sent in the first place.
In case you didn’t get the last part, it basically means that accounting did not stop the cheques as Prichard requested in order to mail new ones. Instead, they FedExed the original in envelopes that were run through postage but were never mailed. He revealed that even Hulk Hogan had payment issues when he was working for TNA.
Prichard said that when he brought up this chaotic issue to Dixie Carter, her reaction was simply saying “well, they got paid”.
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