In fact, if you follow the rumors surrounding the expected departure of Alex Shelley and maybe Matt Morgan (although I doubt the latter rumors), even today there is a lot of doom and gloom around TNA. One constantly hears that the locker room is in turmoil, that TV ratings are stagnant at best and that pay-per-view buys almost make the exercise of having PPVs pointless.
And still, here it is. TNA’s 10th anniversary and the Impact Wrestling TV show is one of the highest-rated on the Spike network and not in any danger of losing its clearance. On May 31, the program will move to 8 pm, eastern, and for a time at least, will be broadcast live, in an effort to boost the ratings.
There also is the potential of additional TNA programming on Spike or elsewhere. (Obvious starting places would be an Impact replay in the same timeslot every week, a pick-up by Spike of Xplosion or the creation of a new TNA program. I have suggested before and really like the idea of a one-hour weekly show modeled on the old WCW Main Event, which broadcast Sundays at 6 pm on TBS, and, in my vision, would include taped footage of house show matches. Others have proposed spinoff shows for the Knockouts or the X division.)
I don’t know why Shelley (reportedly) wants out. I certainly don’t know anything about the backstage environment at TNA. I truly don’t understand how a promotion thought to be struggling financially can keep so many wrestlers and on-air talents under contract when it really only utilizes a portion of that roster.
But maybe I’m just a glass-half-full kind of person but I don’t understand the negativity that seems to surround TNA. All in all, I think we’re looking at a success story that still has a good chance to bloom into, if nothing more, a second national wrestling promotion that someday could compete with WWE.
This won’t happen by doing all that WWE does – TNA’s success will be predicated in part on its popularity overseas – the successful British tour, which I am sure the company plans to try to replicate elsewhere, and the apparent good results with Ring Ka King in India. (I am aware that it’s questionable whether that show will get renewed for a second season. But if it does, look out – India has a population of over 1 billion, and being the premier wrestling promotion there would be quite a beachhead for TNA and its financial backers.)
But at the same time, people who want or expect TNA to be something almost completely different from WWE are off the mark too. I see the competition as more akin to “McDonalds vs. Wendy’s” than to apples and oranges. In offering an “alternative,” TNA is trying to offer a recognizable, mainstream pro wrestling product that does some things differently (some of us think it does things better) than WWE, but is not trying to re-invent the wheel.
Recently, I have been reading parts of Brett Buchanan’s free, online e-book The Genesis of TNA (found here) and it has confirmed something I always suspected but did not know for sure. That is that TNA properly understood should be seen as a continuation, an inheritor, of the legacy of World Championship Wrestling.
Vince McMahon and WWE own the WCW copyrights – they own the terms NWO and Four Horsemen, Monday Nitro and Starrcade, etc. They own the archival footage. But TNA and the people behind it see themselves as the legacy of WCW and they are trying to continue (what they consider) the better parts of what WCW was and what it offered to an audience as an alternative to WWE that nonetheless was a polished pro wrestling product with a healthy dose of sports entertainment.
TNA is not Ring of Honor or some indy promotion. It’s not trying to be. And that’s not a swipe at those federations – but TNA is trying to be something bigger. A second major league, if you will. Many think they won’t get there. I think they’re already part of the way and I’m sticking around for the journey.
How is TNA different from WWE (besides corporate wealth and size of fan base)? To me, TNA, like WCW before it, aims to tell a compelling story, just like WWE, but to also take the competition and the wrestling component of its product a bit more seriously than WWE. Maybe a lot more seriously. I know this is a thing of the past now – but WWE’s decision to scrap the word “wrestling” for a time and call its talent “in-ring entertainers,” which TNA quickly responded to by saying “wrestling matters” spoke volumes to me.
Some complained of a lack of follow-through on that slogan, as if in adopting “wrestling matters” TNA suddenly was going to become a stripped-down, more hardcore product like ROH. Honestly, if that’s what you’re hoping for, I think you’re going to be disappointed. Simply put, there is more money to be made by appealing to a broader audience, and that is what TNA is shooting for, just as ROH really is trying to be the new ECW, without the name and some of the, well, poor taste and judgment that went with ECW.
The X division really can be seen as a successor to all the great cruiserweight matches that anchored the first hour of Nitro before the departure of the Radicals to WWE. I honestly believe that if WCW had survived, AJ Styles would be there, as would Christopher Daniels and some of the other TNA stars – because they just don’t belong in WWE, any more than John Cena or Randy Orton would belong in TNA.
All TNA fans probably have their ideas about how they’d like the product to be different. On some things, almost all of us agree – we’d all like to see more Impacts and pay-per-views on the road. Some of us would like to see the return of the six-sided ring. Some would do away with the Knockouts. Some would place much more emphasis on the X division, others not at all. Many would bring back some of the promotion’s gimmick matches.
I were the booker, I’d probably try to make Impact be more like the Saturday night World Championship Wrestling program from the mid to late 80s, with big-name wrestlers coming right out to the announce area and cutting live promos that seemed to put them right in your face, your living room. But maybe that wouldn’t work – a significant portion of the audience never saw those shows and might consider the kind of back-and-forth you used to get from Flair and Rhodes as corny.
TNA is known for putting on routinely solid house shows at small venues before small audiences, for uneven television that offers too many matches that probably should be saved to increase buy-rates for pay-per-views, and for generally disappointing PPVs. Just as WWE builds to Wrestlemania and then basically re-starts with a new year following that event, TNA tries to do the same with Bound For Glory.
TNA is the house that AJ Styles built. And the Knockouts. And all the X division wrestlers. And Bobby Roode and James Storm. And Abyss. And also some people who first made their names elsewhere – Bully Ray, Jeff Hardy, Kurt Angle, Sting, Christian Cage, Rhino, Mickie James.
My suggestion – take the good with the bad, be a participating fan through sites like this and other ways to communicate to TNA what you want and what you don’t want, and most of all be glad that you have an alternative – a Marvel to WWE’s DC, a Coke to their Pepsi, a Mac to their PC.
If Vince McMahon had succeeded in consolidating the North American pro wrestling business and all there was today was WWE and its various “brand extensions,” I would not be a wrestling fan at all. I am not saying they are bad – I don’t watch their product so I don’t really know. I just know that I felt talked down to by WWE even when I was much younger than I am now – and I am thankful that I have TNA and TNAsylum as alternatives to what Marvel Comics, during its Golden Age, called “Brand X.”
I hope you are thankful too.
“Heed the Messenger”
E-mail: JH3_2000@Yahoo.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/JosephHaas2
