“WWE & TNA sign multi-year deal to continue partnership”. To a fan of a certain vintage, that headline might as well read “hell has frozen over”. Granted NXT sending people to Impact isn’t as dramatic as other “hell frozen over” moments, like the returns to WWE of Bret Hart, CM Punk and others, but it’s still pretty bizarre to me to see those two logos next to each other in 2025. WWE and TNA have a long and complicated history together, mostly negative, or at least passive aggressive, with TNA often being the chihuahua biting at WWE’s ankles. What better time than now then, so talk about maybe the most passive aggressive acts one wrestling company has ever done to another. At the very least one of the snarkiest. I’m talking about what became known as Cookiegate. In this video, we're going to examine what exactly happened, who was involved.
2004 is an interesting year for TNA, in that a lot of big changes were made in the still very young company. In this year they ditched their weekly pay per view format, moved to monthly pay per views, starting with Victory Road in November 2004, along with their first major television show, Impact, which over six different US channels and what feels like a dozen or more time slot changes, still exists today.
Victory Road was built around a hyped up main event where Jeff Hardy would challenge Jeff Jarrett for the NWA World title in a ladder match. While you could argue that the rest of the show wasn’t the most stacked of cards. It did very well for what TNA expected. For the next one, Turning Point, they went all out to find new draws to keep the momentum going. At the end of Victory Road, while Jeff Hardy was nearing the title at the top of the ladder, he would be turned on by Scott Hall and the debuting Kevin Nash, who would form an Elvis inspired faction with Jarrett, known as the Kings of Wrasslin’. I’m sure you don’t need telling that I’m not an American, but even I know that Hall who was from Maryland, which is just below the mason dixon line, nor Michigan born Nash are the most ‘southern’ of wrestlers, making the Elvis stuff come across a bit weird. The Kings would lay waste to TNA’s most popular babyfaces, AJ Styles and 3 Live Kru, more of them in a bit, before a foot is shown getting out of a limo backstage. That foot is shown to belong to the Macho Man Randy Savage. All of this is to say that at the next TNA pay per view, Randy would wrestle what ended up being his last ever match, by which I mean he would show up at the end of a six man tag team match, as part of the odd sounding team of he, AJ Styles and Jeff Hardy, to defeat the Kings of Wrestling.
Though you might think that the in ring return of Randy Savage, who hadn’t wrestled a match for a major wrestling promotion since WCW in 2000, might have been enough of a draw, TNA still was looking for other ways to draw some extra buys, even through a daft attention grab like Cookiegate. By the way, this is not important but in case you were wondering, Randy’s final match on pay per view at this point had been five years earlier at WCW Road Wild, where he defeated of all people, Dennis Rodman. But what actually was Cookiegate, and how did it come about? In the Summer of 2004, TNA began taping Impact at Universal Studios in Orlando Florida. Ordinarily I’d dive into the beginnings of this partnership, but I did that quite a while ago on this channel. Sometime after TNA had begun it’s residency in Orlando, WWE sent half of their roster to a lot at Universal Studios, to film a commercial for their upcoming Royal Rumble pay per view. This would be the 2005 Rumble advert, the one that resembled West Side Story if you were on hallucinogens. A lot of top level talent was brought in to film the advert, with one person quoted in the Wrestling Observer estimating that the shoot cost anywhere up to half a million dollars. (Nov22) They noted that traditionally wrestling pay per view commercials had only really existed to push the date of their shows, but how dare they try to insert a little creativity. These could possibly have served as a trial run of sorts for the 2005 series of Wrestlemania commercials that were all parodies of well known scenes in movies, from Forest Gump to Pulp Fiction to Gladiator and a few more.
When TNA learned that WWE would be literally in their backyard, they rolled out the welcome wagon, sort of. Members of the TNA roster, Shane Douglas, Traci Brooks, Abyss, BG James, Konnan and Ron Killings all approached WWE’s production, claiming that they came in peace, bringing balloons, and cookies with them. They also brought a camera man, and clearly intended to use the footage they captured of their WWE counterparts. WWE, behaving like the adults in the situation, quickly instructed their talent to have nothing to do with the TNA stars, and so TNA didn’t get a ton of footage. They coined the term ‘Cookiegate’ themselves, implying that they had some scandalous footage that made WWE in some way look bad. To be very clear, they did not, or at least they didn’t air anything that made WWE look bad. Two hours and eighteen minutes into the pay per view broadcast, after the Randy Savage tag match and before the actual main event, a six sides of steel match for the NWA tag team titles, Mike Tenay and Don West throw to TNA’s Director of Authority Dusty Rhodes, who demands that the production truck plays Cookiegate.
The first thing we see is Douglas introducing the segment, along with Traci carrying cookies and Abyss holding balloons. I’ll say it here so I don’t have to mention it again, there are several references to Traci bringing cookies and muffins. Shane says that they are there to welcome WWE because quote “they’re here to check out what a professional wrestling programme looks like.” They cut to footage showing BG James and R-Truth, along with a ton of blurring, presumably to hide the WWE wrestlers faces. We then see the TNA crew interacting with this wrestler, who at first I thought could be Eddie Guerrero but his outfit doesn’t match, so maybe Luther Reigns? No relation, obviously. We hear BG James a lot here, mostly talking about wanting some of their catering, and asking for various people to come out, like Vince McMahon and Chris Benoit. He tells one person “Vince might remember me, I made a lot of money for him.” We then see this bloke, who quite clearly seems to be Rey Mysterio, who clearly didn’t get the message about not interacting. BG James then tells us with glee that Ron Killings stole their Mahi Mahi. FInally we get a group shot of all the TNA crew, including Konnan who doesn’t at all look shifty. He enters the shot carrying a two by four with a towel taped to it, which it took me a sec to realise meant that they were waving the white flag. They make a few inside jokes about the idea that Vince might be there, and BG and Killings one again reiterate that they stole some food, and we cut back to Mike Tenay and Don West. Bless Mike and Don, but they did their damndest to push the question of how WWE could have threatened to sue them over some generous hospitality, but not even they could save this. Mike even asks if this is anything like DX driving a little jeep up to WCW’s back doors. It’s not the same, because that was at least funny.
I mentioned earlier that this aired near the end of the pay per view, which you might think would be to build suspense and intrigue? No, it was to preface it with a bunch of daft sketches. Throughout the night, in an attempt to get over how WWE didn’t want the footage to air, a fake Triple H and Vince McMahon wandered around the impact zone like bumbling fools trying to find the tape. These aired throughout the night and varied in quality, but I’ll be honest and say that I laughed out loud once, when the bloke playing Triple H says he was looking for the tape but he found the gym. The Vince character, who they refer to as “Mack Daddy”, gets assaulted by a little person and leaves in an ambulance. The internet tells me that these two were played by Bobby Roode and Petey Williams, and to be fair, the guy playing Triple H is quite funny. The Wrestling Observer claims that the Vince character was played by a ring announcer called Tim Welch, while Triple H was played by Johnny Devine, whose trunks look similar to those of Hector Garza, who owned a pair of trunks that had a H on them. All of this was supposed to make WWE look bad, but many fans just thought TNA looked a little sad for airing it, and promoting it beforehand as some sort of expose.
In his review of the show, Dave Meltzer in the Wrestling Observer described the Cookiegate footage as “innocuous” and “almost useless”. He noted that WWE wrestler’s faces were blurred, confirming that one of them was Luther Reigns. He also noted that Rey Mysterio and Konnan in particular had been close since they trained together in the 80’s, which is likely why he stuck around longer than most. Luckily Rey was one half of the Smackdown tag team champions at the time, and he continued to win his matches after this, so clearly wasn’t punished for his part in hanging around.
While TNA claimed that they came in peace, they certainly picked an interesting set of wrestlers to send over. While a couple had no link with WWE at all, most had some axes to grind with their former employers. Let's start with Traci Brooks, who at the time would have been TNA’s longest tenured female performer, which is a polite way of saying that her and Trinity were TNA’s entire women's division for a fair while. As far as I can find, she has never had any link with WWE. Speaking in an interview with Highspots not long after Cookiegate, Traci gave her account of what happened. “We were shooting kind of like a desperate Housewives thing and we had cookies and I was all dressed up, and the boys thought it was funny.” On WWE’s reaction she said “whether Vince was pissed off or not I have no clue. He shouldn't because You' never sell a rib and he shouldn't have been mad, but it got exposure for us, it got us buyrates for the next pay per view and it was funny and people talked about it so I was glad to be a part of it.” On the surface what Traci said here seems fairly innocuous, but it does show that she doesn’t exactly seem bothered if WWE doesn’t call after this. She would remain with TNA until 2012, and in 2023 was inducted into the Impact Hall of Fame.
The other fairly innocent party is the Monster, Abyss. Looking back it's hard to remember a time when Abyss wasn't known for insane bumps. While he actually competed on the first TNA event using the name Justice, he would begin his run as Abyss in June 2003, and so had only played the character for nearly a year and a half. As noted this was long before Abyss was known primarily for hardcore matches and an obsession with landing on drawing pins, or thumb tacks in American. Being a big intimidating looking masked wrestler, he was often compared to Mankind and Kane back then. In 2019, Chris Parks would join WWE as a producer, and would briefly appear on Smackdown in the pandemic era, as AJ Styles’ statistician, but this is as close as he ever got to being a WWE wrestler. Well, sort of. There was a rumour back in 2007 that he might have been WWE bound, possibly even to face off with the Undertaker at Wrestlemania 23, which could have been a lot better than that Mark Henry match the year earlier. On a 2015 episode of Jim Ross’s Ross Report podcast, Abyss said that John Laurinitis offered him a contract and a main event position. He said Tommy Dreamer had helped him get contact, as he worked in the WWE office at the time. Abyss then said he turned WWE down at the last minute out of loyalty to TNA, the company he saw from the ground up, saying "I would rather have been part of something versus taking the chance of going somewhere and just being a number." He was asked if he regretted his decision by Ring Rust Radio, and Abyss said “Being a part of TNA since the beginning is something that I am extremely proud of. I'm not saying other places aren't great places to go work, but for me the decision to stay on that occasion and several others is that I love TNA.” When asked about creative plans by JR, Abyss said he was due to debut at the 2007 Royal Rumble, and start a story with Undertaker that would have led them to Wrestlemania. Undertaker would win that years Royal Rumble match, and then go on to beat Batista for the World title at Wrestlemania 23, so I think he did alright. Abyss also won the NWA World title from Sting at the end of 2006, perhaps for his loyalty if you believe his side of things.
BG James, perhaps better known as the Road Dogg, might be the most controversial choice for TNA to have sent. Having left WWE in early 2001 due to issues in his personal life, Road Dogg might be the unluckiest wrestler of all time. Speaking on the WWE Network’s Monday Night War series in 2014, he told the story of attending the final WCW Nitro in the hope of getting a job there, only be the last person in wrestling to discover that WWE had bought the company, and there was no chance of a job any time soon. Road Dogg, then using the name BG James, would be an early hire for TNA, and would stay until late 2009. James and Billy Gunn have admitted before that during this time in their careers they were loose cannons to put it politely, and they said many things that they later regretted. For example the two once took part in an RF Video shoot interview where they went off on WWE, Triple H, Shawn Michaels and more targets they would end up apologising to. They also talked a fair bit of smack about WWE on television, renaming their team the Voodoo Kin Mafia, VKM, aye, and would repeatedly challenge Shawn and Triple H to a fight quote”at the alamo”, which obviously never happened. On a September 2023 episode of his podcast titled “Oh you didn’t know”, Road Dogg noted that “the soundstage that TNA shot it was literally right next door to the soundstage that WWE was recording in.”
I can’t move past BG James in this video without getting to the Mahi mahi that he was so insistent on drawing attention to. In his podcast Road Dogg explains that the reason for this was because WWE’s catering was so far above what TNA provided them, making their own sound like something out of the Fyre Festival. “In TNA at the time we got like a boxed lunch and it was literally like a sandwich, an apple and a thing of chips.”
Ron Killings, better known to WWE fans as R-Truth was another fairly recent former employee who was part of the welcoming committee. Killings had been a tag team partner of the Road Dogg, using the name K-Kwik before his release. He hung around a little longer before he too was released in late 2001. As far as why he was released, in The February 11th 2002 Wrestling Observer, Dave Meltzer reported that Killings had given a recent interview where he stated that he was given no reason for his firing, and then when he inquired nobody got back to him. You could see why he might have had a chip on his shoulder then.
Konnan and Shane Douglas also both have history with WWE prior to Cookiegate, and both were there around the same time in the early 90’s. Konnan was only in the company briefly, and was slated to bring life to the Max Moon character. Konnan actually created the character himself, even playing the role in WWE a couple of times, before being replaced by Paul Diamond. According to Konnan himself though, it seems that not moving to WWE was his own choice. Speaking in an interview he said that “I was blowing up in Mexico, I was doing a soap opera and a rap record and I was tired of lugging boxes over to WWE and I was like I’m a star here, what do I need this for?”
Shane Douglas, having been a Dynamic Dude in WCW, and the Franchise in ECW, would become Dean Douglas in WWE. As I’m sure you can imagine, he wasn’t entirely thrilled with that. But then Shane Douglas doesn’t seem the type thats thrilled by much at all. His role in Cookiegate just seems to be shit stirrer, as he is often seen grinning throughout the footage. Mind you, with a list of enemies as long as Shane Douglas has, that’s hardly surprising.
So those are the wrestlers involved, but did you know that none of them were the original choice? Dave Meltzer mentioned in the November 22nd 2004 Observer that the crew that showed up weren’t their original choice. “TNA set up an idea of a reprise of DX invading WCW, as they were going to have Hall & Nash invade the WWE Royal Rumble tapings on 11/10 that were held at Universal Studios.” He then adds that Hall and Hash declined to be part of it, possibly because they were only signed to limited dates and this would have counted as one, but also because the likely didn’t want to burn any bridges with WWE, clever really. In a funny and quite self aware manner, on Road Dogg’s podcast when his co-host informs him that Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were the original choices, Road Dogg’s reaction is “well that would have been a lot better.”
There is one person left to mention, and that’s the man behind the camera for TNA, David Sahadi. Having previously worked for WWE, he knew a lot of the talent who were at the shoot, and was the one who first discovered that WWE were going to be there. During his time working for them, he made a memorable video package that aired for Wrestlemania 14 featuring legends like Classy Freddie Blassie and Ernie Ladd. The video was so emotional in it’s tone that upon viewing it Vince McMahon wept, which is dangerous really, because it could have caused him to rust. Sahadi had left WWE in ‘03, joining TNA in the following year and the noticeable improvements in TNA’s production quality in the early years of Impact are often attributed to him. Unfortunately for Sahadi, according to the man himself speaking to Conrad Thompson in 2024, his role in Cookiegate may have resulted in some personal loss. David’s Father had been a longtime employee, and he alleges that his father was punished for his role in Cookiegate. “My Dad was given a Legends contract by Vince McMahon Jr because he worked with Vince Sr. He did a lot of stuff with Mike Tyson during the Attitude Era, with Lawrence Taylor, so he was getting a $3,000 check every single month.” He then goes on to explain how WWE took that monthly cheque away, and he alleges that it was because Kevin Dunn wanted to get back at Sahadi for his work with TNA. “I found out that there was a meeting in Kevin's office with some people who I won't mention, and they said, 'How do we get back at Sahadi for him trying to screw us? Again, I wasn't going to screw them’ I was trying to get PR for TNA.”
So that was TNA’s attempt at getting some PR out of WWE coming to their backyard, a not too serious attempt at invading WWE. Before the footage had even aired Dave noted in the Observer that “The guys who came out, like Jericho, Guerrero, Benoit, Mysterio, etc. were guys that everyone in wrestling likes and they ended up just talking. Orton and Heidenreich came out and were nice to all the TNA guys, so the idea of some big confrontation fell apart.” They only exception seemed to be John Garburick, who fans saw in Tough Enough, who told the TNA crew that they would be sued. It seems though that the worst WWE did was to file a complaint with Universal Studios. Despite this and a legal letter that was sent to them, TNA clearly wanted to make more of an issue out of this. “On the 11/16 tapings, Mike Tenay announced that fans could vote on the web site whether they want to see the footage or not. Bob Carter has given the company the go-ahead to air the footage even with the WWE threats, and of course fans will vote to see it and of course it will air against WWE’s wishes.” This led to an interesting reaction, as beforehand Cookiegate was made to sound like a much bigger deal than it ended up being, and TNA’s wrestlers ended up looking nothing like DX did at CNN center. Back when DX did their invasion of WCW, it would have ended very differently had the WCW wrestlers warmly greeted Triple H and crew, and they didn’t even bring cookies.
Sources:
TNA Turning Point 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4wPsqswVUw 2:18:08
WWE Royal Rumble 2005 commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wom0eCbH4HM
Wrestling Observer December 13th 2004 - Turning Point review https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/december-13-2004-observer-newsletter-paul-heyman-wwe-writing-team-tna/
Highspots interview with Traci Brooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwyEG4ShLOo&t=2852s
Abyss Undertaker rumour - https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2015/11/abyss-on-why-he-didnt-sign-with-wwe-in-2006-603699/
Abyss on regrets: https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2015/01/abyss-on-if-he-regrets-not-signing-with-wwe-and-facing-588738/
Oh You Didn’t Know #76, September 23rd 2023 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPaUAYI09pg
Wrestling Observer February 11th 2002 - Killings on his firing https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/february-11-2002-observer-newsletter-questions-surrounding-njpw-talent/
Konnan on Max Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwuBHKxtriU
Wrestling Observer November 22nd 2004 - Hall and Nash https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/november-22-2004-observer-newsletter-survivor-series-review-samoa-joe/
David Sahadi role in Cookiegate - https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/david-sahadi-recalls-wwe-firing-his-father-hurt-him-taking-part-tna-cookies-vignette
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