Million Dollar Man
02-16-2005, 05:39 AM
The GOODNESS~!
On Sunday night, TNA produced another one of their monthly 3-hour pay-per-views. It was another show I did not order. I want to believe in TNA and I want them to become a player. I want them to get that magical Monday night timeslot, or at least a better one. I want them to become a solid #2 on the wrestling scene where they are drawing more than 900 fans and more than a glorified indy show. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen….
Before I get to the heart of my rant, let me quickly state that the concept of monthly PPVs is a terrible idea in the short term for TNA and it appears to me that they’re doing it because they need that income to keep the promotion alive. If they were smart, they’d have four or six big pay-per-views with time to build towards and put more quality matches on Impact. Their long-term survival is based on getting good TV ratings and somehow getting another hour or a better timeslot. They are not going to achieve either with squash matches and a bunch of matches squeezed into an hour. They need to get people to watch Impact. Cassidy Riley is going to bring in the ratings. Neither is Monty Brown squashing somebody. And they really need to make their PPV’s seem important and have events that seem similar in stature to the WWE’s “Big Four”. But unfortunately, that’s not TNA’s biggest problem right now.
Billy Gunn. X-Pac. Kevin Nash. Scott Hall.
What do those four have in common? They are all washed up. What else do they have in common? They’ve been prominently featured in TNA’s “main event” recently.
Nothing makes TNA seem more bush league than trying to pawn off a Kevin Nash/Jeff Jarrett main event as something worth any amount of money, let alone $30. If this were 1996 or 1998, then maybe I’d buy Kevin Nash as a star. But his last WWE run exposed Nash as an old man with a broken down body whose time has clearly passed. For a company like TNA, trying to create its own niche, pushing an elderly man who was jobbed out of the WWE is not a good start.
And what about Billy Gunn and X-Pac running in during the main event? Could they have found two more irrelevant wrestlers on the planet? How many times did the WWE repackage Billy Gunn since 1999? Four? Five? Six? And how many times did it work? Zero. X-Pac was so reviled that there’s even a certain sort of “heat” named after him – X-Pac heat – when the crowd despises someone so much, they boo them lustily and, unfortunately, give the impression they care. And yet, there were both men involved in TNA’s “main event”.
The problem, it seems, is that TNA is run by people that are either marks for themselves or “name” wrestlers. This is by no means a problem in wrestling that is confined to WCW. The AWA might still be around in its legit form if its owner wasn’t a mark for old-school wrestling and his last name. WCW might still be around if Eric Bischoff wasn’t a mark for Hulk Hogan and his cronies. And right now, TNA has fallen in love with every two-bit wrestler that spent even a day in WCW or WWE. It could end up being TNA’s downfall.
Now I’m not here to say there isn’t a place for veterans – I think Dustin Rhodes and Raven right now are proving they can be entertaining to the fans in the mid-card. However, I think we’d all look down upon either of those in the main event. I wouldn’t mind Billy Gunn in a spot where, say, Jeff Hardy is – putting over TNA talent. But he’s not and I doubt he will. He’ll be running with the big boys because he said, “suck it” in 1998.
What’s so frustrating about the situation is the fact that TNA has gotten to the point where they have the homegrown talent to step up and “run” with the ball. Abyss has proven to be a cross between Kane and the bastard child of Mick Foley. A.J. Styles is probably the most visually stunning wrestler in the ring, while Petey Williams and Elix Skipper have done things that just make you shake your head in disbelief. America’s Most Wanted is the best, most over tag team in ALL of North American wrestling and they’ve only found one real good feud for them – against XXX – in a year.
Above all this though, my biggest complaint is that they have the breakout, crossover, mainstream star they need right there. It’s Monty Brown. Do they need a manual on how to create a wrestling star? He’s got credibility with the mainstream sports media because of his NFL playing days and two Super Bowl appearances. Remember when the Rock was starting to hit it big and ESPN was running features about the Rock in college? Turn that up a notch for Brown. Brown also has a great and engaging personality that was enough to get me to watch him on the Best Damn Sports Show Period – a.k.a. the worst show on television – to see what he was like. He was awesome. And he’s got a catchphrase that little kids will love to emulate. Is it really hard to figure this out?
If you read what anybody writes about TNA it’s always about the new guys – Abyss, Styles, Brown, etc. You don’t read anyone writing about how great Nash is or how awesome it is to see a fat, out of shape Scott Hall wrestling Jeff Hardy. And it’s pretty simple really – wrestling fans are marks for what’s new.
We get very bored very quickly and we like things we haven’t seen before. I started downloading A.J. Styles matches in late 2002 after several columnists were raving about his work. I watched Brown on the aforementioned stupid Fox show because Larry, our beloved Impact reviewer, kept raving about him weekly. That’s the ticket to success – giving us stuff we’ve never seen before, not stuff we’ve seen and already grown tired of.
So TNA, I beg of you. Give me Monty Brown as champ. Give me Styles/Daniels/Williams in an Ultimate X on Impact. Take Billy Gunn and have Abyss squash him in five minutes while simultaneously squishing X-Pac. And if you’re going to give me Nash, Hall, Rhodes, DDP, etc…give them to me in small doses where they can entertain me, not annoy me.
On Sunday night, TNA produced another one of their monthly 3-hour pay-per-views. It was another show I did not order. I want to believe in TNA and I want them to become a player. I want them to get that magical Monday night timeslot, or at least a better one. I want them to become a solid #2 on the wrestling scene where they are drawing more than 900 fans and more than a glorified indy show. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen….
Before I get to the heart of my rant, let me quickly state that the concept of monthly PPVs is a terrible idea in the short term for TNA and it appears to me that they’re doing it because they need that income to keep the promotion alive. If they were smart, they’d have four or six big pay-per-views with time to build towards and put more quality matches on Impact. Their long-term survival is based on getting good TV ratings and somehow getting another hour or a better timeslot. They are not going to achieve either with squash matches and a bunch of matches squeezed into an hour. They need to get people to watch Impact. Cassidy Riley is going to bring in the ratings. Neither is Monty Brown squashing somebody. And they really need to make their PPV’s seem important and have events that seem similar in stature to the WWE’s “Big Four”. But unfortunately, that’s not TNA’s biggest problem right now.
Billy Gunn. X-Pac. Kevin Nash. Scott Hall.
What do those four have in common? They are all washed up. What else do they have in common? They’ve been prominently featured in TNA’s “main event” recently.
Nothing makes TNA seem more bush league than trying to pawn off a Kevin Nash/Jeff Jarrett main event as something worth any amount of money, let alone $30. If this were 1996 or 1998, then maybe I’d buy Kevin Nash as a star. But his last WWE run exposed Nash as an old man with a broken down body whose time has clearly passed. For a company like TNA, trying to create its own niche, pushing an elderly man who was jobbed out of the WWE is not a good start.
And what about Billy Gunn and X-Pac running in during the main event? Could they have found two more irrelevant wrestlers on the planet? How many times did the WWE repackage Billy Gunn since 1999? Four? Five? Six? And how many times did it work? Zero. X-Pac was so reviled that there’s even a certain sort of “heat” named after him – X-Pac heat – when the crowd despises someone so much, they boo them lustily and, unfortunately, give the impression they care. And yet, there were both men involved in TNA’s “main event”.
The problem, it seems, is that TNA is run by people that are either marks for themselves or “name” wrestlers. This is by no means a problem in wrestling that is confined to WCW. The AWA might still be around in its legit form if its owner wasn’t a mark for old-school wrestling and his last name. WCW might still be around if Eric Bischoff wasn’t a mark for Hulk Hogan and his cronies. And right now, TNA has fallen in love with every two-bit wrestler that spent even a day in WCW or WWE. It could end up being TNA’s downfall.
Now I’m not here to say there isn’t a place for veterans – I think Dustin Rhodes and Raven right now are proving they can be entertaining to the fans in the mid-card. However, I think we’d all look down upon either of those in the main event. I wouldn’t mind Billy Gunn in a spot where, say, Jeff Hardy is – putting over TNA talent. But he’s not and I doubt he will. He’ll be running with the big boys because he said, “suck it” in 1998.
What’s so frustrating about the situation is the fact that TNA has gotten to the point where they have the homegrown talent to step up and “run” with the ball. Abyss has proven to be a cross between Kane and the bastard child of Mick Foley. A.J. Styles is probably the most visually stunning wrestler in the ring, while Petey Williams and Elix Skipper have done things that just make you shake your head in disbelief. America’s Most Wanted is the best, most over tag team in ALL of North American wrestling and they’ve only found one real good feud for them – against XXX – in a year.
Above all this though, my biggest complaint is that they have the breakout, crossover, mainstream star they need right there. It’s Monty Brown. Do they need a manual on how to create a wrestling star? He’s got credibility with the mainstream sports media because of his NFL playing days and two Super Bowl appearances. Remember when the Rock was starting to hit it big and ESPN was running features about the Rock in college? Turn that up a notch for Brown. Brown also has a great and engaging personality that was enough to get me to watch him on the Best Damn Sports Show Period – a.k.a. the worst show on television – to see what he was like. He was awesome. And he’s got a catchphrase that little kids will love to emulate. Is it really hard to figure this out?
If you read what anybody writes about TNA it’s always about the new guys – Abyss, Styles, Brown, etc. You don’t read anyone writing about how great Nash is or how awesome it is to see a fat, out of shape Scott Hall wrestling Jeff Hardy. And it’s pretty simple really – wrestling fans are marks for what’s new.
We get very bored very quickly and we like things we haven’t seen before. I started downloading A.J. Styles matches in late 2002 after several columnists were raving about his work. I watched Brown on the aforementioned stupid Fox show because Larry, our beloved Impact reviewer, kept raving about him weekly. That’s the ticket to success – giving us stuff we’ve never seen before, not stuff we’ve seen and already grown tired of.
So TNA, I beg of you. Give me Monty Brown as champ. Give me Styles/Daniels/Williams in an Ultimate X on Impact. Take Billy Gunn and have Abyss squash him in five minutes while simultaneously squishing X-Pac. And if you’re going to give me Nash, Hall, Rhodes, DDP, etc…give them to me in small doses where they can entertain me, not annoy me.