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IN DEFENSE OF TNA

It's WCW 2000 all over again. Vince Russo needs to go away forever, and if that doesn't happen, then TNA needs to go away forever.

I used to be a huge TNA fan, and then they brought back Russo, and the entire company went right down the toilet almost immediately. I gave them chance after chance over the months after he returned to creative, and the product they foisted on us was utterly putrid. It's WCW 2000 all over again, and as someone who was a huge WCW mark in the 90s, I now am having the pleasure of watching the same person destroy my favorite wrestling company for a 2nd time.

It's been 18 months and counting of stupid angles, insipid booking, ridiculous gimmick matches, and awful television. I'd rather see a company I used to enjoy be put out of its misery than watch it limp along in such a miserable fashion.

These were comments made by one person on the PWInsider Elite message board in response to Kaz’s (possibly worked) release from TNA earlier this week. It really amazes me how nothing TNA does can satisfy some people. For some reason, a lot of people seem to have this idea that wrestling promotions are never supposed to make any bad steps or ever book anything that isn’t the greatest angle of all time. I think a big part of this is that some people just like complaining and will look for any little thing they can to whine about.

I think a big part of this is that people got so spoiled by the nWo and Attitude eras of WCW and the WWF respectively, but most people don’t seem to remember that there was a lot of crap going on even during those so-called golden ages. Even when the nWo was at its high point in 1996 and 1997, don’t we remember Glacier, Wrath, and Mortis? The Dungeon of Doom? How about Raven’s Flock? Yes, you had Benoit, Malenko, Guerrero, and Jericho, you had the luchadores, and even DDP and Savage were having good matches. On the other hand, you had Steve McMichael killing the workrate of every match he was involved in and joining the Horsemen no less, Jay Leno wrestling, and the seemingly neverending series of matches between Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Big Bubba Rogers.

And I’m not letting the WWF off the hook, either. For every Austin vs McMahon, TLC match, and Degeneration X, you had the Kennel From Hell, Prince Albert tattooing his victims, and the Big Boss Man stealing the Big Bastard Show’s father’s casket. You had Kane and his burned, nonfunctional penis, Tazz being consistently beaten by Jerry Lawler, and Drew Carey in the Royal Rumble. Do I need to remind anyone of Austin picking up Triple H’s car with a forklift while he was inside and dropping it from about 20 feet up to end a PPV main event without a finish, which was then followed up by Wile E. Helmsley coming out on Raw in perfect condition the next night? I’m sure the Attitude Era is a period Bart Gunn would like to forget after getting knocked out cold by Butterbean at Wrestlemania.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh. After all, this is the company that had Billy Gunn win King Of The Ring, then kiss a fat woman’s ass after losing to The Rock at Summerslam? And that love triangle between Triple H, Steph, and Kurt Angle worked out great too, didn’t it? Hey, remember when Austin got hit by a car to set up that forklift spot I mentioned earlier, and then they took the super-popular Rikishi and killed his career dead by making him the driver? That 24/7 rule with super heavyweight Crash Holly as the champion sure did wonders for the Hardcore Title. I stand in awe of the Right To Censor, as they were somehow able to accomplish the unbelievable goal of killing five careers with one gimmick.

Hey, at least they tried some new things, right? For example, we were treated to Lo Down. I mean, why wouldn’t we get behind a tag team of two guys from New Jersey who like to have fun…and are managed by a rich Indian who can’t wrestle or promo? Giving Chyna the Intercontinental Title not once, but twice was some good stuff. Remember when she was helping Eddy Guerrero study for his GED? They tried to keep that under wraps, but I heard about it from my friend Joe…Just Joe. He also told me about Terri’s evil plan to steal Moppy from Perry Saturn and throw her into a wood chipper, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to tell poor Perry in time. I couldn’t get ahold of him because he was too busy hanging out with Dean “James Bond” Malenko while he was trying to pick up on Lita.

Okay, I think I’ve made my point. For all the people who run down everything WWE and TNA do and pine for the glory days of the Attitude Era, I point to the previous four paragraphs of pure crap as evidence that everything wasn’t 100% peachy keen then, either. And for as much as Russo is associated with the Attitude Era WWF, except for one or two of the things on that list, everything there was done after he left, so you can’t pin those on him. The WWF was able to create all that junk on their own without any help from Vinny Ru.

So if the greatest promotion in the world was able to come up with that much crap during what was supposedly their most successful period both financially and creatively, why are we dumping so much pressure on both WWE and TNA to be 100% perfect today? Most of WWE’s problems over the last few years has revolved around their unwillingness to take new talent and give them meaningful pushes and character development, but I’d say that this is a problem that’s been addressed in the last month or so, to great results. CM Punk, Kofi Kingston, Ted Dibiase Jr, and Cody Rhodes comprise Raw’s championship roster, and the ratings have been consistently higher since the changeover, while before that they were consistently slipping and were in real danger of dropping into the 2s.

As for TNA, no, they’re not doing everything right either, but I think they’re being buried way too badly and way too often. Let’s look at some of the main complaints that are often levied against TNA:

All the homegrown TNA guys are pushed aside in favor of WWE castoffs.

To a certain extent, this is true. However, the fact of the matter is that the WWE guys carry a name value that America’s Most Wanted, AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels, and yes, even Samoa Joe do not have to offer to anyone outside of the smart internet community. This is a name value that has helped the ratings grow, ever so slowly, but they have been growing. And let’s be fair here, it’s not like they’re bringing in stiffs like the Godfather and Kenzo Suzuki, TNA’s getting Kurt Angle, Christian Cage, and Booker T, who are great promos and are still amazing performers even though they’re getting older. Yes, VKM is there and I can’t explain that away, and other chumps from WWE like Rikishi and Test have come in, but they had nothing to offer and lasted a taping or two at most and were gone.

They should have given Joe the TNA World Title sooner.

Should they have? Yes, Samoa Joe has been over almost from the moment he walked through the door into TNA. Yes, he’s a terrific worker and a great promo. But there’s other considerations that go into making somebody your World Champion. If all it took to be World Champion was being a great worker and terrific promo skills, then Christopher Daniels would have spent most of the last six years as World Champion. The first thing is the national recognition factor. For all we forget about it because we’re immersed in the wrestling world and TNA is just “there”, to everybody on the outside, it’s a new entity that is competing for attention in an industry (television) which traditionally turns its nose up at wrestling. Even WWE has had a hard time finding a home for Smackdown, which draws a lot more viewers than Impact does. So if you’re a fledgling company trying to put together a successful TV presence, do you think you’d have an easier time getting people to tune in if you have nationally recognized names like Christian Cage and Kurt Angle on top…or former ROH Champion Samoa Joe? I’m sorry, I love Joe as much as anyone, but selling a lot of DVDs to a niche audience doesn’t amount to as proven a track record as being a headliner for WWE and, in Angle’s case, a Wrestlemania main eventer.

Another thing to consider is that over the last few years, WWE has tried putting a World Title on young guys, or guys who are relatively new to national TV, and it didn’t work out too well for them. Brock Lesnar burned out within two years, and Randy Orton has a superstar attitude and has also had a pretty infamous string of incidents which probably ended up leading to his first World Title reign ending pretty quickly and the second one coming years later than it otherwise would have. We can all say that Samoa Joe’s a true professional and that wouldn’t happen, but how does TNA know that? They’re not Gabe Sapolsky, they didn’t already book Joe to hold their top title for two years like he did. And even still, it’s on a different scale. They needed to have Joe working main events and prove that he can not only hang in the ring with the ex-WWEers, but also show that he can handle the pressure of having TV ratings and PPV buyrates hinge on how well he performs. That kind of pressure made Eddy Guerrero completely crack under the pressure, and we’re talking about a guy who has years of experience in the business going all the way back to pretty much birth, was an amazing worker, and had the utmost respect for the business. If it can happen to Eddy, it can happen to anyone.

In the instant gratification society we live in, it’s pretty easy to sit here and say “This guy should be champion right now because he has great matches!” I heard it for years with Benoit, and in a way Joe became the Benoit of this decade as the guy who has great matches but the evil bookers refuse to give him the strap. I think TNA was smart for holding off on the World Title win because it’s smart business, and WWE showed what can happen when you hotshot a new guy to the World title too quickly.

Vince Russo is a booking scourge that destroys everything he touches.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Vince Russo is a booking genius. He has a lot of really stupid ideas and seriously needs to have somebody to filter out the crap. Giving him sole booking control has been proven to lead to trouble in the past. That said, there are a lot of things he does well. For all the dumb stuff he comes up with, he has been able to get some pretty important people over in TNA. Okay, AJ Styles has always been a great worker and all that, but his personality was as bland and boring as saltines. Making him a goofball hick may have gotten some cries of protest from the “He’s a great worker and he doesn’t need this stupid character!” crowd, but he’s grown into a personality that people can connect with beyond just his ability to work, and through it all he’s developed a pretty decent ability to cut promos that wasn’t there before. Same thing with Jay Lethal, everyone knew he was a great worker, but he didn’t break through until Russo heard his Randy Savage impersonation backstage and made it into his gimmick, and now he’s a serious crowd favorite.

One other thing that Vince Russo does that nobody gives him credit for is he takes everybody on the roster and tries to do something with them. They might not always be successful, but he’ll do whatever he can think of to try and get somebody over. Contrast that with WWE. How many people does WWE have under contract who are either just sitting at home or are wasting away on the house shows and Heat (when it was around, anyway)? And aside from the main eventers, most of the guys on the main rosters have had zero character development, they’re just there for when somebody important needs jobbers to squash. That has never, never ever ever been the case when Russo’s in charge.

(Wrestler X) is so talented and they’re not pushing him!

This goes back to Russo working his ass off to get people over however he can. Russo will do all he can, but he can’t take somebody who just doesn’t have it, or isn’t motivated to work, and make them into something great. Lance Hoyt is a great example of this. He’s an okay worker (I’m not going to cream over him like a lot of people do), but is just a black hole of charisma, which means he’s either not able or not willing to do what it takes to break through. Sucks to say, but I have to believe that if he had what it took, he’s been in the company long enough that he would have broken through by now. Instead he hasn’t, and now he’s stuck in a comedy jobber tag team with Jimmy Rave, a guy I could go on for days about how he was given chance after chance after chance for years on end in Ring Of Honor and was never able to truly get over.

That’s the problem with a lot of guys in TNA. Guys like Petey Williams, Robert Roode, Sonjay Dutt, and Chris Sabin are all incredibly talented workers, but just don’t have the personality it takes to break through, and no amount of gimmickry is going to make any of them World Champions. Sabin’s at least broken through in his tag team with Alex Shelley (a guy I think is infinitely superior to his partner and absolutely has the ability and personality to break through one day), but he’s going no further until he can show some kind of character and promo ability.

On the flipside, I think we’re discounting the guys who have gotten over. Even putting aside the guys like Styles, James Storm, and Eric Young who have been there for years, you’ve got a pretty good list of guys who have developed into something in TNA. Homicide may have been known in the northeastern indies for years, but has become a nationally recognized name and is one half of one of the two or three top tag teams in North America. And what was Hernandez doing before joining LAX? I’ve already touched on Jay Lethal, but what about his ROH mentor Samoa Joe? Yeah, he was already famous for his run as ROH World Champion, but the TV-only fans didn’t know that. He’s probably the most over guy in the company right now.

Hey, remember how we talked about too many WWE guys coming in? What about Tomko? That guy was NOTHING in WWE, he was a lump of tattooed muscle and that’s it. Granted, a lot of his success in TNA is thanks to him going to Japan and learning how to work, but he was motivated and made the effort and went to Japan and learned, and thanks to that and his totally surprising ability to be an effective cool, sorta-silent character, he’s moved up and is now an upper-midcarder to low-level main eventer now.

TNA has also created a very respectable women’s division chock full of women who had zero national exposure before coming to TNA. Awesome Kong is one of the most over people in TNA, female or otherwise. She’s joined in the TNA Knockouts division by ODB, Gail Kim (another WWE castoff who became somebody in TNA), and Roxxi LaVeaux, all of whom are way over in TNA.

Does TNA get everybody over? No, definitely not. No promotion can. But they try a lot harder than WWE does, and I think they’ve had a lot of success. How many people do you know of who made a national name in CZW? PWU? PWG? Hell, even ROH doesn’t have the ability to get people over to a national audience the way TNA does, and that’s one of ROH’s main points of frustration. There’s no way you can look at this list and say that guys aren’t getting opportunities.

I could keep going, but I think you get the idea by now. I think wrestling fans just need something to bitch about, and will harp endlessly on whatever problems they can find, or at the very least, create out of their imagination. I think in a world where we’ve seen Wrestling Society X, WXO, and the WWA, we ought to be thankful that there’s a promotion like TNA around to provide an alternative to WWE because looking at the alternatives, we could be a lot worse off.

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