By Michael Moore, PWTorch Collectibles specialist

In Brief: Don West talks about his own collection, the evolution of TNA's merchandising, which wrestlers are collectors of, and more.

If you ever flipped through channels late at night during the late 1990s, you probably saw the loud, enthusiastic, and sometimes obnoxious guy selling baseball cards and sports memorabilia. Don West’s antics on the Shop at Home channel became so famous that he was parodied several times by Will Farrell on Saturday Night Live.

For West, selling sports cards and memorabilia wasn’t just a job. He began collecting baseball cards at age 5 and has been passionate about sports collectibles ever since. West has brought his knowledge of and enthusiasm for sports memorabilia to TNA. His understanding of what sports collectors want has led to TNA selling collectibles that had never been available to wrestling fans before.

In this exclusive interview with the Pro Wrestling Torch, Don West talks about his own collection of sports memorabilia, which wrestlers are collectors, the evolution of merchandising at TNA’s live events, the types of products TNA will offer in 2012, and more.

Torch: To begin with, tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get into cards and sports collectibles?

West: I’ve been a collector of baseball cards since the age of 5. Literally, 1968 Topps (baseball) is what I cut my teeth on. I have every complete set from ’68 to probably ’79. At one time I probably had over 60, 70,000 cards. I’ve been just a baseball card collecting fanatic since I was a kid. I have collected everything sports memorabilia wise. It was just something that I was always attached to.

Torch: Do you still collect cards and memorabilia today? What kind of stuff do you collect?

West: I don’t do too much of the cards, because it just got too hard to figure out what to get. In the early ‘90s when it broke, you just didn’t know where to put your money. Mainly I’m now more into sports memorabilia, making the man cave look like the coolest room in the neighborhood. I’ve got a lot of stuff that’s personalized, stuff that I would never sell.

Torch: What are some of your favorite items in your collection.

West. I’ve got quite a few. Probably number one is the Honus Wagner that Wayne Gretzky gave me (laughs). A ’52 Topps (Mickey) Mantle is my big daddy. As far as sports I’m a huge, huge Cubs fan, so the Billy Williams rookie and the (Ron) Santo rookie and the (Ernie) Banks rookie, those are always my pride and joy.

Torch: Are any of the TNA wrestlers big collectors? I know, for example, that Kevin Nash has a pretty impressive baseball collection.

West: Oh, absolutely. In fact when I came to TNA, it was so cool: the people that would come up to me and go, “Oh my God, I’ve watched you at three o’clock in the morning.” D’Lo Brown is a huge collector. Back when I was on TV, Samoa Joe used to watch all the time. Kevin Nash, of course we’ve talked about that. In fact, Mr. Anderson, his mother bought a bunch of Green Bay Packer memorabilia off my show in the early ‘90s. She bought like autographed helmets, Brett Favre this and that, just some great stories. There were a lot of collectors that came up to me; it was just a big kick in the pants.

Torch: TRISTAR made a few different cards of you for some different TNA sets. What was that like for you as a lifelong card collector?

West: That’s always the lifetime dream if you’re a trading card collector. You always want to see yourself on one. So having three or four different cards, I made sure to collect oodles of all of them. That’s one of those things, kind of like Saturday Night Live when Will Farrell imitated me, it’s one of those moments in life that you get that you’ll never forget. Your first trading card is the coup de grace.


Torch: What kind of input do you have into what goes into the items offered at shoptna.com and the live events?

West: I would say about 99 percent is me (laughs). I don’t mean that in a bad way. When Taz came over, that freed me up to be able to do what I do. Live events, we were starting to take off, but we just weren’t selling any merchandise. There wasn’t a plan in place. Then it was like, “Okay, folks, we’ve got to change what we do here.” Pretty much all the different things that we do – autograph signings and the unique experiences to get your pictures taken with the Knockouts and the backstage experiences, things like that – these were all just things that I thought about and put together, and they’re really working. We really do an unbelievable dollars-per-head number on the road. It’s a lot of fun because wrestling fans are really and truly the greatest people in the world. If you’ve got the product, they’ll buy it; that’s one thing I’ve learned.

Torch: I took my kids to a WWE house show in October, and the only live events they had ever been to before that were TNA live events. They were so disappointed because they didn’t get to meet the wrestlers. After going to two TNA shows, that was just their idea of what happened at a wrestling event.

West: Jeff Jarrett used to always tell me, “We’ve got to do it one fan at a time.” We’ve got to make sure that if they come to our events, that they have access to as many people as we can put in front of them. You can’t put everybody out there, and certain characters you don’t want to because you want to keep their mystique. For the most part, we give them access, and they’re going to get to meet anywhere from five to 10 people at a show, and there’s nothing like that for a kid, to go home and say they got to meet their favorite person and get a picture taken with them. That’s how we’ve got to do it; we don’t have the machine behind us. We’ve got to do it one fan at a time; Jeff’s right about that.

Torch: What are some of the most popular items that are sold through the site or at the live events?

West: Anything with Jeff Hardy on it. He reminds me of the Michael Jordan days at Shop at Home. It’s unbelievable to be at a show and watch every kid come in with sleeves and face paint and Hardy shirts. It’s just unbelievable. He’s a rock star. But we do really well with a lot of different things. Action figures sell great, toy belts, things like that. We put together packages for people that they can get four or five different things. The brown bag special is something I created, with the DVDs and the T-shirts. We’ve sold probably 100,000 of them in the last few years. It’s funny; I’ll go to live events now and they’ll grab me out in the hallway and say, “Do you have a brown bag special?” It’s kind of taken on a life of its own. We take about 80 to 100 different products to a show. We’ve got the one stand generally, but it’s loaded. There’s something for everybody.

Torch: I’ve talked to some friends who have been to recent live events and they have just marveled at the number of the Jeff Jarrett guitars that are sold.

West: I’m glad you brought that up. Adam McCowan, who runs the shoptna website at the office, is a big musician and he was showing me these engraved guitars that they had for some singers. We were thinking, “Man, we’ve got to see if we can get the Jeff Jarrett impression on there.” And Jeff was like, “Oh, I’m afraid it won’t sell. It’s a $200 item.” I thought it would, and 2,000 to 3,000 guitars later, it is one of those things that we can go to a show and sell two dozen without trying. We attach something to it; you buy it and you get to go back and meet Jeff, we’ll let you go backstage at intermission. It’s the real deal; there’s nothing cheesy about it. It is a nice guitar. So not only are you taking home something cool, but we give them an experience with it. And if they ever bring it back to another show, it’s like a guaranteed backstage pass. There might be some other people they want to sign it that they didn’t get at the last show. So if they bring that back, I let them go backstage for free at every show. It’s really been one of the coolest items that we’ve ever had.

Torch: What kind of stuff do you have planned for 2012?

West: Right now the big thing is all of the toy combinations that we’re doing. We were able to secure a lot of the remaining Jakks-Pacific inventory, so we now have more TNA action figures than anybody in the country. I’m doing things like you can get 12 different action figures for $59, I’ve got every one of them autographed, you can pick and choose which ones you want for a certain price, it’s now become part of the brown bag special. You can literally collect all of them that you want in any configuration: autographed, un-autographed, any way you want it.

Torch: What is the status of the Jakks line of TNA figures? It’s been a while since anything new has been released. A lot of readers ask about that.

West: We just got two new ones. We just got an exclusive Jeff Hardy glow-in-the-dark figure and a Jeff and Matt combination that has ladders. There is a new series that should be there any day.

Torch: Do a lot of wrestlers pitch ideas for their merchandise?

West: Absolutely. They’re all coming up with great ideas. It’s something I’ve noticed being on the road with them; they care. They’ll literally walk up to the stand and say, “I don’t want my shirt on that row, I want it up higher so it’s at eye-level.” That shows me that they care, and they want to sell their products. It really is neat.

Torch: Being a sports collector, you know that a lot of collectors, especially high-end collectors, like to have a game-worn jersey hanging on their wall. Do you have any plans to incorporate something like a T-shirt worn by Mr. Anderson or sleeves worn by Jeff Hardy?

West: Absolutely. If you go to the website right now, we have an auction site. We did a Christmas commercial with all of the beautiful Knockouts wearing different pieces of merchandise. Right now you can bid on which one you want, whether it’s Velvet Sky wearing the Hulkamania shirt or Mickie James wearing the James Storm shirt. We took the ones they wore, got them to sign them and put them on there. We’re going to be doing so much more of that. In the next year, you’ll see more game-worn jerseys, as we call them, than ever before. We’re going to do that for every big pay-per-view; we’ve got the turnbuckles from Bound for Glory right now that you can buy, the actual turnbuckles used in the ring, it’s really cool, autographed by all the wrestlers. That’s my big goal: in 2012, we really amp up the opportunity for people to get stuff that’s worn by the wrestlers.

PWTorch Collectibles specialist Michael Moore can be reached at michaelmoorewriter@gmail.com. Check back for his next bi-weekly column on Tuesday.

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