SPOTLIGHTS
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| And we're rolling... |
| Posted by Steve Cook on 04.21.2007 |
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I attended the TNA house show at the Louisville Gardens last night. Since it's been already covered on our wrestling page, I will give you my perspective right here in ye old blog. Because...well, it's Saturday night and I've got nothing better to do while waiting for Cro Cop to kick somebody's head off.
We arrived at the Louisville Gardens just in time to catch most of the opening match pitting Petey Williams & Sonjay Dutt against Eric Young & Robert Roode. This match just didn't click with me for a couple of reasons...the Petey/Sonjay teaming was kinda random, and I still don't understand why Roode keeps teaming with a guy who keeps costing him matches and doing nothing to help his cause. But hey, it still had Ms. Brooks out there, and that's enough to make anything tolerable in my book. Roode got pinned by all three guys, but that would just be the beginning of his problems...
Christopher Daniels defeated Senshi in the next match. It was pretty good, though it took awhile to get used to Daniels working a different style than we'd seen from him in...well, forever. People still wanted to cheer him, which seemed to get under his skin. But what can ya do, the Louisville fans had interesting rooting patterns on this night.
Speaking of interesting rooting patterns, LAX got lots of cheers and worked as babyfaces as they defeated the Naturals. Good to know that losing the tag team titles didn't hurt their popularity...even though technically they're heels. They worked babyface here though, and signed autographs during intermission. So yeah, I don't know what's up with that, but they were quite over. Of course, I was cheering for them, but as a by gawd Internet Rasslin Journalist, I'm allowed to cheer for bad guys.
Jim Cornette then came out to cut his promo and bring out Eric Young. Eventually Robert Roode & Ms. Brooks came out to get him to tell them who his "friend" is...and JT will be pissed at me because I'm spoiling something on next week's Impact, but it's Jeff Jarrett. Jarrett hit Roode with a nice guitar shot and got a good reaction. I must say I'm surprised that Jarrett's gotten over as well as he has given that he was pretty much despised by everybody before he left. I think it's the fact that he's bringing back his old school mullet. Everybody loves a mullet. We also love guitars that don't quite break on the guy's head.
And Ms. Brooks got spanked...it wasn't quite what it was in my dreams, but Eric Young usually isn't involved in my dreams.
We got to see the debut of the Bashams in TNA, as Doug Basham lost to Rhino in a Derby City Streetfight. You could tell it was a Derby City Streetfight because a construction cone and a tennis racket were used. The downside of this match was when they went out into the crowd and nobody could see what they were doing because the lighting in the building sucked and the spotlight operator seemed to be celebrating 4:20 Day.
Intermission time! I'll take this opportunity to say that TNA sells some pretty awesome t-shirts.
After the intermisison, Chris Harris & Gail Kim beat James Storm & Jackie Moore. I appreciated them combining the previously scheduled Harris/Storm & Gail/Jackie matches into one. I also appreciated Gail's ring attire. Harris gets bonus points for figuring out he could take off his eye patch and see things better towards the end of the match.
Samoa Joe beat AJ Styles in a really fun match that got my nod for match of the night. Not quite up there with their singles match on a PPV in late 2005 that I can't remember the name of, but it was pretty solid. Both guys were pretty over, but Styles did get booed during the match because...well, he was against Joe.
And in the main event, Christian Cage beat Kurt Angle with lots of help from Styles. They tried to beat Angle down some after the match, but Abyss came out and made the save despite being all stitched up from his beatdown on Impact. The crowd was pretty split here, I'm not sure if it was due to Christian or the way Angle's kinda been flip flopping between face and heel on television lately. But both guys did have their fans.
All in all, it was a pretty fun time. I would suggest that they have more lighting the next time they come to the Gardens, because the one light under the huge scoreboard wasn't really cutting it. Other than that, I have no real complaints. I don't know if TNA will have a PPV in Louisville, but it was a pretty good crowd for their first time there. They've still got some work to do before they'll be able to fill the place up, but it could happen.
See ya Wednesday!
EDIT: Wow, Cro Cop got his head kicked off instead. See, this is what happens when you don't pre-determine these things, you end up with all your marketable guys losing. |
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