That Was Then, Is This Too? 09.15.09: The Wasted Potential Division

Posted by Jasper Gerretsen on 09.15.2009

Join us for another episode of That Was Then, Is This Too?, as we take a look at the floundering Knockouts division and compare it to another division that started out red-hot but eventually collapsed.

Welcome to yet another instalment of That Was Then, Is This Too?, the column that looks for parallel lines in all the right places. As usual, we have comments.

actually nigel turned heel not because he "couldn't gain traction as a babyface" but because he got injured and the ROH fags got all pissy so he told them to fuck off.

Posted By: supa sta (Guest) on September 08, 2009 at 02:56 PM

I think you're confusing the reason and the method of Nigel's heel turn. He was turned heel because he wasn't catching on as a babyface, and they turned him heel by having him lash out at the fans.

Danielson beat Nigel at Driven as well, this time with Cattle Mutilation.

Posted By: This guy! (Guest) on September 08, 2009 at 03:38 PM

I have no idea how I got that mixed up. Thanks for the correction though.

With that out of the way, let's go to our regularly scheduled banner!



That Was Then, Is This Too? - The Wasted Potential Division

On August 16th, 2009, at the Hard Justice PPV, the TNA Knockouts division jumped the proverbial shark. In a tag team match that pitted ODB and Cody Deaner against Velvet Sky and Angelina Love of The Beautiful People, Deaner pinned Sky to 'win' the Knockouts championship. It had all the hallmarks of the very worst of Vince Russo booking: A singles title being defended in a tag match, and a winner that's not actually qualified to hold the title they won. In the end Foley ended up declaring the title vacant, with a title match between Deaner and ODB set for the next PPV.

Of course the division wasn't always in this sorry state. In fact, when it was started up in 2007 it was off to an incredibly promising start. They had signed a very good combination of unique independent talent in ODB, Roxxi and of course Awesome Kong, along with several names that fit the more traditional mold for women's wrestlers such as Velvet Sky and Angelina Love. These new faces, combined with several established TNA veterans such as Ms. Brooks, Jackie Moore and Gail Kim, made for a very promising lineup.

From the very first moment the new talent was presented, it was clear that the division would be built around Gail Kim and Awesome Kong. Kong absolutely dominated Kim in their first match, which was shown on the last episode of Impact! to hype the gauntlet match that would establish the first Knockouts champion at Bound for Glory 2007. The match was a gauntlet battle royal, which went pretty much exactly as expected, considering the talent involved. As soon as Kong entered, she completely dominated, eliminating pretty much everyone in the ring at that point and even 'injuring' Christy Hemme. She was eventually eliminated through the concentrated effort of three different Knockouts, and with the biggest obstacle out of the way Gail Kim was free to cement her place in TNA history as the first Knockouts champion.

For the next few weeks she would feud with Kong, meeting in several violent matches including a no disqualification match and a falls count anywhere match. Kim would hold on to the title for almost three months before finally falling to Kong on Impact!. They would continue to feud, most of the time in tag matches also involving Kong's manager Raischa Saeed and ODB. Eventually Kim moved away from the title picture, making only sporadic challenges before eventually signing with WWE.

TNA tried to recreate the magic of the Kim/Kong feud by putting Kong up against Taylor Wilde, who was booked as a plucky babyface in the same vein as Kim. She would hold the title for almost the entire summer of 2008, but they never reached the same level of intensity that Kong and Kim did. Kong would eventually recapture the title at a special edition of Impact! aired from Las Vegas, and she would continue to hold the title until Lockdown 2009. Kong would turn face against The Beautiful People, but Angelina Love managed to capture the title in a three way steel cage match. She traded the title briefly with the artist formerly known as Victoria before losing it to Deaner to reach the clusterfuck that is the division today.

Of course the Knockouts division had plenty going on outside of its title picture, which is one of the things that definitely made it better than the WWE diva divisions at times. After losing her hair in a Russo-esque clusterfuck involving a reverse battle royal into a steel cage into a ladder match, Roxxi would be rebranded as the hardcore knockout, a gimmick which mostly involved plunder matches and bleeped swearing during her promos. Mickie Knuckles, a female deathmatch wrestler mostly known for her work in IWA-MS, worked as the enforcer of The Beautiful People under the moniker of Moose, until she broke her femur at an IWA-MS show. She was sidelined for nearly half a year, and TNA opted not to bring her back.

Naturally, there were also some absolutely cringe-worthy angles, the biggest of which was Daphney being brought in as "The Governor". As a parody of Sarah Palin she managed to convince The Beautiful People that they would be part of their cabinet. The joke was funny for about two minutes, so naturally TNA decided to stretch it out to almost two months. Eventually Daffney would be 'unmasked' and start competing under her own name, aligning herself with Stevie Richards and competing in several hardcore matches, taking some sick thumbtack bumps in the process.

Overall, it seems that the Knockouts Division stopped living up to its potential around the time Gail Kim left. They certainly had some good matches, but unfortunately the promise of being a serious alternative to WWE's airhead divas and bringing serious women's wrestling to a national stage remains only partially fulfilled, and the new Knockouts tag team championship doesn't seem like the right way to fix that.

That Was Then...

About a decade earlier, another company started up a new division based around providing an alternative to the mainstream. I'm not talking about the WCW Women's Championship, which lasted about three months and was never actually held by the woman it was created for (although Madusa does come into the picture later on), but their Cruiserweight division, which, after a false start in the early 90s that lasted just short of a year and mostly revolved around Brian Pillman, was restarted in 1996 through a tournament held in New Japan Pro Wrestling, with whom WCW had an extended talent exchange program.

The division was mostly created to harbor several of the more talented wrestlers coming into WCW off their talent raids on ECW. Chris Jericho, Eddy Guerrero, Dean Malenko, Rey Misterio Jr., Juventud Guerrera and many others formed an incredibly exciting division that produced stellar matches on both the weekly television shows and the PPV broadcasts, often providing extremely enjoyable highlights on cards that were otherwise marred by WCW's trademark poor booking. The mask vs. title match between Misterio and Guerrero at the 1997 Halloween Havoc PPV was the perfect example of this, with both men flying around the ring for just shy of fourteen minutes, hitting all their high spots with incredible crispness while still finding time to tell a compelling story.

The Cruiserweight division eventually fell victim to something that had always been a huge problem in WCW: the dreaded glass ceiling. Cruiserweights like Chris Jericho, Eddy Guerrero and Dean Malenko were incredibly over and brought the house down every time they stepped into the ring, but for all their hard work and dedication they never moved beyond the midcard. They occasionally got to branch out to compete for the United States or Television Championships, but beyond that it seemed like the cruiserweights would simply never get the career advancements they deserved.

It was this problem that eventually led to an exodus of most of the talented cruiserweights, with Jericho, Malenko and Guerrero jumping to WWF. With the division gutted, it quickly went downhill. The pivotal moment was probably Lenny Lane's title win over Rey Misterio Jr. on Thunder. Lane was tagging with Lodi as the West Hollywood Blondes, a parody of the old Brian Pillman/Steve Austin team of the early nineties. The strong homosexual undertones of their gimmick led to Lane being forced to vacate the title because WCW's parent company, Turner Broadcasting, feared a negative backlash.

As I said before, it was all downhill from there. The title was held by Madusa, (a woman) Oklahoma (a Jim Ross parody played by Ed Ferrara), Daffney (another woman) and a whole host of other wrestlers who simply couldn't hold a candle to the standard set by Malenko and company during the early years of the division. They made one last-ditch effort to revitalize the division by bringing in stables like Three Count and The Yung Dragons, but the company would go under before any significant progress was made and WWE ended up all but ignoring the title, only signing a handful of Cruiserweights.

...Is This Too?

It certainly seems that both divisions are classic examples of wasted potential, starting out promising, providing several excited matches and drawing in high television ratings, only to eventually peter out. Both divisions started out as true alternatives, with the Knockouts going up against WWE's divas and the Cruiserweights going up against the heavyweight style that had dominated American professional wrestling for years.

Of course the whole glass wall issue doesn't seem nearly as strong for the knockouts as it was for the cruiserweights. Even without Spike TV's ban on man-on-woman violence, we'll never be able to see women as serious competition for men for all the obvious reasons. Kong had a very brief forey into TNA's tag division as part of a tournament for the vacant titles, but the match was on PPV and she and her partner B.G. James were eliminated in the very first round. Still, despite the fact that Knockouts matches are often the highest rated segments of TNA's weekly broadcasts, they've only been featured in one Impact! main event and have never had a truly long PPV match. More Impact! main event slots or the occasional 20 minute title match would go a long way to truly show that TNA takes their knockouts seriously.

TNA has so far been extremely lucky to have avoided any major talent exodus beyond Gail Kim, but that can easily be explained by the fact that WWE simply doesn't care about their women's division. Still, that lone departure seems to have deflated the Knockouts division, which, combined with all the poor booking decisions that have been plagueing the division for the past few months, mean that it's only a shadow of what it used to be.

The introduction of a tag division might have been a poor idea on paper, but it has certainly brought a whole slew of interesting new talent into the company. We have the return of Roxxi and Cheerleader Melissa finally taking on a more marketable gimmick than veiled Syrian mouthpiece for Awesome Kong as Alissa Flash. Furthermore we have Sarah Stock, who mainly worked in Mexican Lucha Libre promotions now working for TNA as Sarita, and third generation wrestler Ayako Hamada coming in from Japan.

In the end, I don't think we have to worry about the Knockouts division suffering the same fate as the WCW Cruiserweight division. They still have a very healthy talent base, they are bringing in new talent from all over the world and Scott D'Amore, the agent responsible for the early success of the Knockouts division, has finally returned. Still, all this can only go so far in the face of the absolutely ridiculous booking that TNA is known for, and which has been affecting the Knockouts division more and more over the past few months.