Austin Aries On His “Bad Attitude” That Led To 2007 TNA Release

Austin Aries is the face of Impact Wrestling/TNA right now as the Impact World Champion, but things weren’t always great between the two.

Ten years and multiple regimes ago, Aries and his employer didn’t see eye-to-eye. In 2006, Aries was suspended for arriving late to a pay-per-view. A year later, he was suspended again for having “a bad attitude” in regards to taping promos during his day off. During his second suspension, he asked for and was granted his release. 

Appearing on Talk is Jericho with Chris Jericho, Aries discussed the issues that led to his 2007 suspension and subsequent release. He began by offering a bit of backstory and one source of his frustration.

“They had the all-cage pay-per-view in St. Louis. And they didn’t bring the cage. I was always trying to decide if it’s worse if they forgot or someone made the decision not to bring it,” said Aries. “They had the crew there trying to build the cage and we called it the Six Sides of String. We were all instructed where we could and couldn’t stand. The whole pay-per-view was built around the cage and they didn’t bring it.”

From there, he went into detail over how things played out over the next couple of days.

“The story is, we’re at the tail end of this pay-per-view, which is leaving a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouth. The next day is a travel day, which happened to be my birthday weekend. Travel day Monday, television on Tuesday. At this point, the company informed us around the holidays that they would no longer provide hotel rooms or transportation. With it being my birthday, I cashed in some favors and instead of cramming into a hotel room, I got this nice time share. We were gonna have a nice birthday bash on my day off.” Aries continued, “Vince Russo walks in and says, ‘Hey Austin, hey Alex (Shelley). We might need you to do some vignettes tomorrow bros so stay by your phone, okay?’ I’m thinking I’m gonna be nowhere near my phone tomorrow. Long story short, they asked me to come do some vignettes on the off-day. I asked too many questions. ‘How long is it gonna take? Is there any reason why we can’t do them tomorrow when I’m there for eight hours? Am I gonna be paid?’ Which was no. So, I’m paying all my expenses today, but you want me to work, but you don’t want to pay me, how does that work? Basically, I had a bad attitude. Instead of saying, ‘Yes sir.’ I said, ‘Why sir?’ And ‘Why sirs?’ are dubbed as having a bad attitude and are sent home as punishment and suspended and force their way out of the promotion.”

When Jericho asked how he was told about his suspension, Aries stated, “Like real men do, they dropped the voicemail while you’re in the air.”

Aries eventually returned to the company in 2011 and enjoyed a four-year run that included an X Division and World Heavyweight title run. He left once again in 2015 and joined WWE/NXT in 2016. He was back in TNA/Impact Wrestling to start 2018 and currently holds the World Championship. 

Aries will face Johnny IMPACT this Sunday at Bound For Glory. Fightful will provide live coverage of the event.