Josh Alexander has reflected on his minutes-long reign as the TNA World Champion.
At TNA Bound for Glory 2021, Josh Alexander challenged Christian Cage in a match for the TNA World Championship. He relinquished his X-Division Championship, using “Option C” to earn the title shot.
He beat the AEW star to become World Champion but Josh Alexander’s reign was short-lived. Moose used his “Call Your Shot” title match to face Alexander, promptly beating him to become the champion just minutes after Josh Alexander won his first TNA World Championship.
Josh Alexander spoke with Chris Van Vliet about his short title run. He revealed that he didn’t want to do the Moose “cash in” and would have preferred to have a long run with the belt like he did in the years following.
It all worked out well for Josh Alexander though. He beat Moose for the title the following year and embarked on a year-long title run that only ended due to injury.
Josh Alexander On His Short TNA World Championship Title Reign
“I remember the phone conversation, and as I was speaking I was like, Oh, this all sounds great. Yeah, no problem. Cool. All this stuff. And you hang up the phone, part of me was like, Damn, I really wish, it wasn’t like this, because I think I can do some really good stuff, but I didn’t see the forest from the trees.”
“I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a small part of me that was just like, man it’d be cool if you didn’t do the Moose thing and I could just show what I can do, because you never know if that’s going to come back to. I didn’t know that I was going to go on to beat Moose at Rebellion six or seven months later.”
“I’m sure management kind of had an idea to see how it would get over. But anything can happen in wrestling, I could have gotten hurt, Moose could have gotten hurt, and then that match would never have happened. Or anything could have happened that didn’t make it transpire.”
“But luckily, everything does happen for a reason, and we got there eventually. I remember the day I got to my hotel room in Sam’s Town, and I checked Twitter and people are posting clips of the match and saying all these great things, and then they’re just hammering TNA for this terrible booking decision. ‘We’re back to the Vince Russo era’, all this stuff, and I’m just reading just like this is kind of nice, because I guess they wanted me to be champion.”