That Was Then 5.11.07: A Tale Of Two Companies - Part One
Posted by Sam Caplan on 05.11.2007
As TNA approaches its fifth anniversary, it still inexplicably struggles to make itself competitive despite its half a decade of operations.
Today I am going to tell you the tale of two wrestling companies. One was in a mad rush to become a top player in the North American wrestling scene and, despite having a talented roster and the legacy of a 54 year old wrestling confederacy, was constantly plagued by a flawed business model, questionable booking, and all-around lack of interest. The other began as a humble niche product which never aspired to rule the wrestling world, but by putting on a quality product and narrowly avoiding what could have been their demise time after time, gradually grew their fanbase and earned respect with the hardcore fans and finally became a legitimate PPV entity at their own pace instead of rushing to rule the world overnight.
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The first part of our story is about a company called TNA which was started once upon a time in June 2002 by a guy named Jeff Jarrett. Jarrett had been a headliner for WCW in its dying days, mostly because he was the only real option to carry the WCW World Title at that point, but WCW had died in 2001 and left the WWF as the only game in town. Jarrett had already burned his bridges with the WWF and knew that if he wanted to continue working in the business, he would have to find work elsewhere. The problem was that there no longer was anywhere he could work and expect to make real money, so since there was no longer any competition for the WWF, he decided to create the competition himself, and so Total Nonstop Action was born.
Unlike the slew of indies that had cropped up after ECW died, Jarrett had no desire to start an indy company and hope for the best. He wanted TNA to step right in as a top promotion and effectively replace WCW in the North American wrestling hierarchy. Unfortunately, the wrestling business had gone into somewhat of a downhill slide since WCW and ECW died, and as a result Jarrett was unable to get a TV deal for TNA because no networks were willing to take a chance on his product. Jarrett came up with an interesting solution to this problem: instead of continuing to try and score a TV deal or broadcast over the internet or via video releases, TNA would run weekly two hour PPVs for $10 apiece. While the plan was always to eventually move to regular TV and switch to monthly PPVs, this would give them exposure and the opportunity to build a reputation and fanbase in the meantime.
As for the shows themselves, they would feature a combination of established national talent, promising indy workers, and occasional appearances by international stars. They leased the rights to the NWA World Title and the NWA World Tag Team Title in the hopes that the NWA name would give them credibility with old school fans. They also created the X-Division Title with the idea that the stars and matches in the X-Division would appeal to fans of high-flying wrestlers and indy-style spotfests. The X-Division would, in fact, come to be the centerpiece of TNA for quite a long time and, in main eventing many of the PPVs (which were taped two at a time in Nashville, Tennessee), the X-Division Title was seen by some to have surpassed the NWA Title as the most important title in TNA. While that may be said to be complimentary to the X-Division, it was also a knock against the way the rest of the promotion was being handled.
The first problem was that the talent they had brought into the promotion was not quite the launching pad they had hoped for. Though names like Rick Steiner and Scott Hall appeared on the first several shows, the main group of top talent that the promotion was built around were Jeff Jarrett, Ken Shamrock, and a slew of WWE and WCW castoffs like D-Lo Brown, Ron Killings, Marcus Bagwell, and Brian Christopher. The first NWA Champion of the TNA era was Shamrock, but his string of defenses against second or third-rate talent did little to impress, and he soon dropped the title to Ron Killings, who had never accomplished anything of note in professional wrestling and, good worker though he may have been, just made it look like they gave their top title to a glorified WWE jobber because there was nobody else. The title finally swapped to Jarrett, and for the next two and a half years the title would only be held by Jarrett, Killings, or AJ Styles, who was the star of the X-Division and TNA's great hope to emerge as the homegrown star who would eventually carry the promotion.
After that, the problems continued to build. As great a purchase as it may seem to drop ten bucks a week to watch Rick Steiner, Buff Bagwell, Brian Christopher, and Malice swapping wins and losses, nobody was buying the PPVs, and even if they did, the way the PPV business worked meant TNA wouldn't see what money they did make from those early PPVs for months. TNA was losing money from the moment they opened their doors, and by the Fall of 2002 they had run through their entire startup capital and were in danger of closing down when they were purchased by Panda Energy. Their new leader, Dixie Carter, was a smart businesswoman who Jarrett had met while she was doing marketing work for the upstart promotion, and she thought that she could build TNA up to a point where it could compete with WWE. With this new leadership and a fresh supply of financial backing, things were starting to look up for the Great White Hope of wrestling fans who desperately wanted an alternative from the InVasion, gay weddings, and necrophilia storylines that were being seen in WWE.
That hope was premature. Even though the X-Division, anchored by AJ Styles, Jerry Lynn, Amazing Red, occasionally Low Ki, and others was still bringing terrific matches to the PPVs, they were still not putting on compelling enough shows overall to draw people in. Part of the problem was that since people had to pay to see it, there weren't many writers who were willing to drop the money to see the show just to write about it, especially given how bad everything outside the X-Division had become, and this hurt their exposure. They tried bringing in former WCW names like Sting, Lex Luger, Nikita Koloff, and even Tony Schiavone, but to no avail. They tried bringing in former ECW talent, Curt Hennig, and Dusty Rhodes, but none of them created any serious buzz. They even brought in Vince Russo as head booker and an on-screen talent, and shockingly that didn't help either.
Through all of 2003 and 2004, TNA devoted time to finding a regular TV outlet for their product. They had TNA Xpolsion, but that was little more than a bare bones infomercial that was barely watched by anybody. Think WWE Jakked and Metal with about 1/10 of the TV presence. After over two years, they finally got a one year deal to air TNA Impact, a one hour show, on Fox Sports Net. This was a step in the right direction, but far from ideal because they had a 4pm Friday timeslot, during which much of their target demographic was otherwise occupied, and they had to pay the network to air the show instead of the other way around. They were able to end the weekly PPVs and run three hour monthly PPV cards instead, but they still had barely anyone watching, as the ratings would show.
They stumbled along for another year until their FSN contract ran out in June of 2005 and, in the absence of any other network to air their show, began webcasting Impact from their website. However, they did start to make some moves in the right direction during this time, most notably in terms of what they were doing in the X-Division. They hired Samoa Joe and immediately began heavily pushing him and, after spending several months demolishing anyone thrown in his path, he got embroiled in a three way feud with AJ Styles and Christopher Daniels over the X-Division Title, which he would win twice and never actually lose. Other big names were brought to the company at the same time, as Rhino, Christian Cage and Team 3D both jumped from WWE, and TNA was also able to score a huge coup by signing Sting, something WWE had often tried but never done.
They had more good fortune in the Fall of 2005 when they signed a new TV deal with SpikeTV, former home of WWE Monday Night Raw and ECW. Though Spike had had rocky relationships with both WWE and ECW, they immediately got off on the right foot with TNA, and they gave them a late Saturday night timeslot to begin with, but as TNA began to prove itself to SpikeTV, it was moved to a late Thursday timeslot and finally a 9pm Thursday timeslot where it remains today. SpikeTV also gave them several prime time specials, and though the actual storylines were sometimes questionable and some of the more overpushed talent began to wear on people, the in-ring action was usually strong enough that it made for a much more watchable product than what was being pushed only a year earlier.
Things continued rolling for TNA and their outlook continued to improve throughout 2006. Following his excellent series with Styles and Daniels, Samoa Joe began to work more with top names such as Scott Steiner, Rhino, Monty Brown and NWA World Champion Jeff Jarrett, and he appeared in line for a shot at the NWA World Title. Styles and Daniels, in the meantime, had formed a team and won the NWA World Tag Team Title, then segued into a great feud with LAX over the title. Talk began about Impact being expanded to two hours and possibly being moved to Monday nights where they would go head to head with Raw in a recreation of the fabled Monday Night Wars. TNA even scored the signing of a lifetime when they snapped up Kurt Angle almost immediately after he was released by WWE, and they immediately put Angle in a feud with Samoa Joe. TNA was hitting on all cylinders, and showed no signs of slowing down.
Then Vince Russo made his return to the company. Though TNA had been pulling a moderately strong rating, it was felt that there was room for improvement, and so the existing creative team was shuffled out the door in favor of a crew consisting of head booker Russo, Jeff Jarrett, and Dutch Mantel. This new creative regime instantly managed to take everything good that TNA had built up for the last year and a half and flush it all down the drain. Samoa Joe was made to look like a total pansy by suffering his first loss by tapout to Kurt Angle, then go on to lose clean to Angle in a meaningless five-way TV match and an Ironman match, before becoming an ally of Angle's, being jobbed to Travis Tomko, and getting lost in the midcard. Styles and Daniels were broken up, Styles was made into a goofball sidekick to NWA World Champion Christian Cage while Daniels disappeared for a couple of months before returning with a cheap knockoff of Sting's old silent watcher gimmick. Sting won the NWA World Title, then lost it in his first PPV title defense by disqualification, and has done nothing of note since. Team 3D has spent a year and a half floundering in meaningless feud after meaningless feud, and only recently won the NWA World Tag Team Title a year and some after it would have meant something. Abyss had his monster aura stripped of him by being put in a dead end storyline where Sting revealed his past as a prison inmate who shot his father in the back. Jerry Lynn, one of the best workers in the world, was brought back after being sat on the sidelines for two years and has spent the majority of his ring time in meaningless multi-way matches with the other interchangeable X-Division guys.
As TNA approaches its fifth birthday, it is frustrating to have watched them struggle along for years trying to find an identity and a worthwhile TV deal before finally getting most of their stuff on the right track for a full year, only to take their creative direction and point it straight down the toilet and screw everything they had built. As much as people harp on how bad WCW was, especially in its dying days, the fact is that TNA is now halfway through the total lifespan of WCW after it broke from the NWA, and as bad as WCW got at times (and it did, believe me), there is a marked difference between where each company was at the five year mark in a creative sense. At the five year mark, WCW had the cruiserweight division, Ric Flair and Randy Savage were having a great series of matches, there was plenty of top Japanese talent popping in and having great matches, Monday Nitro was neck and neck with Raw in the ratings battle, and they were just about to begin the NWO angle, and that's just the good stuff that was going on that year. Now take that and compare it to what's going on in TNA right now. Is there anything in TNA that even comes close to making you care as much as you did about the cruiserweights, Flair vs Savage, or the NWO? We already saw what happened when they went head to head with Raw, they had their rating cut by nearly two thirds.
Though WCW is known by today's fans as the be all and end all of how horrible a wrestling promotion can be, the truth is that TNA today is far worse than anything WCW ever did, and as much as Dixie Carter will tell you they've got everything under control, the fact is that as long as this creative team is in place, it's never going to improve. It is very frustrating to look at what, since 2002, people have been hoping will develop into true competition for WWE, a viable alternative where people can find their favorite wrestlers if they choose to sign with them over WWE, where they can find better workrate than WWE will allow, or even just something to force Vince McMahon to say "Hey, we'd better start working harder if we want to stay ahead of these guys!" What we're getting instead is a wannabe promotion run by a money mark which has piss poor booking and is managing to fuck up a bunch of great young talents with a ton of potential to the point where nobody will take them seriously ever again. Do you want Samoa Joe to have his credibility ruined the way WCW did with Sting? I sure don't, but as long as they see nothing wrong with having him job to Tomko and then follow that up with giving away the first EVER Sting vs Kurt Angle match on free TV, it looks like we might as well take all our hopes for the future of TNA and throw it down the same goddamn sewer drain that AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels, and Samoa Joe left their fucking potential in.
