Reported by Hunter Golden of WrestleView.com
On Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 4:51 PM EST

Around the Town #1
Monday, February 12, 2007
Reported By: Hunter Golden of WrestleView.com

The Definition of Insanity

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.

If TNA were drug addicts, they’d be in dire need of checking themselves into rehab right about now. How ironic it was that “Against All Odds" was the name of the last pay per view. TNA has been handed ball after ball in the past year and has managed to drop almost every single one along the way. With another incredibly disappointing pay per view from a creative standpoint, and now recent news of even greater financial losses, including but not limited to employees not getting their pay check, one has to wonder if TNA may be on the proverbial ropes, and this time, for real.

Sure in ECW, Paul Heyman was able to borrow money on borrowed money and send his organization into the financial toilet, but at least keep it on life support for a while. But the wasted money belonged or was borrowed by Paul Heyman. It was his and ECW’s money. The difference with TNA is that they’re backed by a publicly owned company whose board of directors won’t be too happy to hear an investment of theirs is not only failing, but not being able to pay their bills. That could lead to potential problems for Panda Energy, not just TNA Wrestling itself. If stockholders see that, it could effect the bottom line. Sure, Panda Energy is far from going out of business but don’t expect to see them keep up any kind of process that results in a consistent loss of money. Heyman was able to keep his promotion afloat for nearly four years. TNA will be lucky to last four months.

So the incredibly generic questions remain: How did they get here? What can they do to get out?

If you want to know the answer to question #1, watch an episode of TNA Wrestling and it should be self-explanatory. For the answer to #2 however, maybe I can shed some light.

TNA has been hiring, administering and implementing failed talents, staff members and policies for months. Wrestlers have been hired who have never drawn or will never draw a dime. Staffers who’ve been consistent failures everywhere they’ve gone have been hired and re-hired. Policies that don’t work have been implemented as well. Again, see the definition of insanity above.

That’s why a huge overhaul needs to be done at TNA. It needs to be done in the front office, it needs to be done on the creative team, and it needs to be done all over. I can hear the wrestlers and the brain trust in TNA’s office right now: “This guy’s a mark and doesn’t know anything about the business and wouldn’t be able to make a dime." Well, last I checked, no one in the wrestling business has been ‘drawing a dime’, either. Maybe it’s time to stop running into the wall and look outside the box.

Here are some suggestions for starters:

First, TNA needs to get serious about touring. They’re going to keep wasting money and angles on pushing story lines people don’t care about. They have no clue of who’s over and who’s not because fans don’t pay to see their product at the Impact Zone. Fans in St. Louis like different things then fans in Chicago do. New York fans are one way, California fans are another.

TNA keeps insisting that they’re indeed looking at touring more, but don’t seem to be showing much eagerness to actually do it. The reason for it is plain and simple. To book touring dates, they need to find and hire someone who’s booked something bigger than a high school gym and have backers and helpers in the front office who aren’t running their own Indy feds on the side, trying to protect their own interests. Sorry kids, this is business, see you and your crappy fed later.

Second, TNA needs to get serious on the creative end of things. Against All Odds, TNA’s pay per view this month, featured about 40 different gimmick matches, making me wonder if any of them meant anything at all. Word to the Management: If you are booking your talent in that many gimmick matches, it’s clear that A.) You don’t have confidence in your talent to get over without a gimmick in the match and/or B.) Your story line sucked so bad you needed to have a gimmick match so people wouldn’t turn off the channel entirely. Gimmick matches should be reserved for title feuds and or the top non-title-holding workers in your company. No one else. If you whore out gimmick matches like TNA does, they lose their meaning and people will stop caring.

Great example of this kind of ‘booking’ was the Springer craze in the late 1990’s. Jerry Springer used to have a fight every once in a while on his show. People would tune in to see if there would actually be a fight. Once it began happening every day, people lost interest. TNA’s about on caliber with Springer these days, so it could learn something from it.

Third and perhaps being a little more prurient to this column’s theme of repeating acts of stupidity, TNA should stop hiring proven failures or are complete powder kegs in the back. Jim Cornette, BLESS the man’s soul (I really mean that), is one of the most wildly entertaining guys to ever grace the business and has a lot of interesting things to say. But anything the guy’s ever done that hasn’t involved him in an on-camera role has failed and failed miserably in a financial sense. I love Cornette and would consider myself a mark for him, but the truth’s the truth.

Vince Russo goes without saying. Why he was hired by anyone for anything blows my mind still, but fire this dolt and please give the fans at least something they want. This is a guy who’s loathed by just about everyone who’s worked with him, for him or under them. The verdict amongst marks, smarks, wrestlers, staffers and anyone who’s tuned into wrestling shows, is that this guy stinks. Yet, he was hired. Nothing the man’s ever done that he hasn’t plagiarized or stolen from someone else has been a failure. Why anyone would consider hiring a guy who’s creative genius ushered in David Arquette’s WCW title reign, consultants, blood being dropped from the ceiling, consultants, contract negotiations and dozens of other things that have driven fans away from wrestling in droves, is frankly beyond me.

Scott Steiner is nuts and does way too many steroids. End of discussion.

Contrary to what they, themselves might think, people like Kip James and BG James are yesterday’s news and perhaps that’s being nice. They weren’t very good then and they’re not very good now. The closest they came to anything was finding a cool catch phrase and yelling it a lot. Then they pointed to their genitals and wore tag belts. I doubt anyone could name any really ‘great’ feuds they ever had.

Lastly and most importantly, stop trying to be the WWE. There’s no one who can out-WWE the WWE. TNA’s production values are Play Dough compared to WWE’s. If people should have learned anything from ECW or any successful business period, it should be that you could make anything out of emphasizing your positives and minimizing your weaknesses. If you are presenting yourself as an alternative, present something that’s, well, alternative from what we see on WWE TV week in and week out.

TNA is lucky to have some of the best young wrestling talent on the planet. So does WWE. The difference between the two is that WWE doesn’t showcase their talent. They focus on skits and acting-based vignettes, etc. If TNA showcased great action, I think they’d pull in a few viewers because they’re offering something the WWE isn’t.

Fans want an alternative, not competition. They're two different things.

How about pushing that tag team division of yours through the moon? LAX may be one of the most entertaining tag teams in the past 10 years. It’s original, it has that ‘real world’ feel to it, and the players compliment each other really well. Give them high profile feuds for the belt and away from the belt. Fans love great tag wrestling and have been looking for it for years. Give them what they want to see.

No matter how talented a worker is, I have yet to see a worker get buried by Vince McMahon and look the same afterwards. Christian as unbelievably talented as he is, just lacks the credibility from the hissy fits and beatings he took week after week on Raw and Smackdown. Rhino was buried before he was ever established on WWE programming. As much as I appreciate their talent, they’re not main event guys if you’re looking at building a company that can 'compete' with the WWE someday. You have to have your own stars that do different things than the WWE guys do.

I hate sounding overly smarky, but really, I figured I’d publicly lend a hand to TNA. Is it arrogant of me? Maybe. Is it presumptive of me? Perhaps. But the bottom line is that the wrestling industry has developed this habit of thinking the fans don’t know crap about the wrestling business and they wouldn’t be able to make a dime. The Wrestling business hasn’t generated much, well, ‘business’ in the past few years either and it’s because they insist on doing the same things over and over again that people hate watching.

As I watched TNA's "however many greatest moments" Show on Monday Night, I couldn't help but think to myself; "This would be a great refresher or reintroductory show for the product if it was, in fact, the product. Thing is, the stuff TNA showed on Monday isn't what they present on Television today.

Creatively and financially, it’s not a question of if TNA will get turned out to pasture by its supporters, but when. If serious changes aren’t made soon, the only other option to WWE programming will be dead. I’m not writing this to be snobby. I want TNA to succeed. Fans should want TNA to succeed. Even, in a way, the WWE should want TNA to succeed. However, until TNA is ready to succeed and make the difficult choices it needs in order to do just that, then it will wallow in the mediocrity for a little more time before going under altogether.

TNA needs to decide whether they want to be an 'alternative' or 'competition' or at least make an effort to distinguish the difference between the two terms if they hope to succeed. Either way they decide to go, TNA needs to start lookingoutside the box with the hope of finding a remedy to the problems that it hasn’t been able to fix on the inside.

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NOTE: The views expressed in this column are not the views of WrestleView.com and its immediate staff.