If I Could Be Serious For A Moment 12.29.08: New Year, New Russo

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot…

There are few figures more reviled in professional wrestling than Vince Russo. If any. The man responsible for numerous “x-on-a-pole” matches, ridiculous swerves and screwjobs, complete shows with no clean finishes and teenage-level humour is the first across people’s lips whenever blame needs to be apportioned in TNA. I’ll be the first to admit that I am often guilty of this myself, and to a certain extent that blame is justified. When the fans chant “Fire Russo” during things like the AJ Styles-Frank Trigg “match”, it’s not because they only know one person’s name on the creative team. Although Jeff Jarrett retains a veto on booking and writing, the majority of the decisions are made by Russo and his “Crash TV” style reminiscent of an ADHD child off his Ritalin. What we tend to do all too often is forget that this man is also responsible for some of the best ideas of the past 10 or so years. When he is controlled by a strong-willed person like a Vince McMahon, Russo can be just the breath of fresh air that a wrestling company needs.

And Never Brought To Mind

It would be remiss of me to write an article praising Russo’s current work without pointing out the bad he’s done. Remember the Fingerpoke of Doom? The Misfits in Action? The cattle prod on a pole match? Sports Entertainment X-treme? Vince Russo, WCW Champion? All Russo’s brainchildren. The same man who became a born-again Christian and started a promotion based around that. Russo is an ideas man, with a creative and fertile imagination that goes faster than his logical brain. However he has no filter between conception and implementation. Left unchecked he will play out all of his ideas on screen, changing them mid-stream if a better idea comes along. He reminds me very much of an outlaw come to rescue his friends with a huge ring of keys. In the cell is a wrestler’s success, and Russo is frantically trying every key on the ring for a few minutes at a time, desperate to free that success before the jailers catch him.

He believed (or possibly still believes) in muddying the face-heel lines, in keeping title reigns short and in interference or swerve finishes. He harboured an intense dislike for foreign wrestlers, lucha-style in particular, and seemingly has an obsession with tag team partners who dislike each other. Not all of these things are bad, but when they are all thrown together, mixed up and added to gimmick matches, the rules of which take several minutes to explain, then the viewer is left befuddled by what he’s just seen.

Russo was successful in WWE because his approach was new, it made for sensational viewing, it brought in a huge audience who never knew what to expect and chiefly because Vince McMahon put the reins on him and was not afraid to choke up on them. Once he went to WCW and convinced the suits there that he needed full control to keep them on top of the war, we saw how dangerous an unfettered Russo could be. The problem has since resurfaced in TNA, where up until recently Russo’s hallmark could be seen in such things as the Lethal Lottery tag tournament, the Rat on a Pole match, the Black Tie Brawl and Chain match and other classics. His dislike for “flippy-floppy stuff” was evident as the X-Division took a smaller and smaller role in the shows, being reduced to 3 minute matches and a 10 minute multi-man spotfest at the PPVs. When it became clear that he was resurrecting to angles that had been messed up before (Millionaire’s Club vs New Blood and Muhammad Hassan’s Arab American), many IWC pundits feared the worst. Especially since one of those mess-ups was his fault.

We’ll Drink A Cup Of Kindness Yet

If we were a fair and just bunch, we would not always expect the worst of Russo. After all, this is also the brain behind D-Generation X, Austin vs. McMahon, the Nation of Domination and the Undertaker-Mankind-Kane feud. Some of his WCW ideas were sound, but were hampered by too many people having creative control. So when the Main Event Mafia angle started to develop well, and when Sheik Abdul Bashir started to cut intense and strong promos that cut close to the bone without cutting into it…well we just shouldn’t have been so thoroughly shocked.

Becoming a born-again Christian, as I’m sure Mr Hubbard will agree, is about redemption and absolution. Whether or not Russo has displayed Christian values in his portrayals of various characters is an issue for a column written by a far more religious man than I. What I do see is that this redemption and absolution has presented itself in several forms, and one of those is to take good story ideas that were done wrong and do them right.

Fixing his own mess

One of the best ideas Russo had after leaving the WWF for WCW was the Millionaire’s Club vs The New Blood. In 2000, after disposing of Kevin Sullivan, WCW brought back Russo and Eric Bischoff who quickly ascertained that WWF was beating them due to allowing the younger talents to carry the ball. The feud saw the young talent in WCW uniting to take on the old guard, who they perceived as holding them down and preventing them from reaching the main event. The fans were supposed to get behind the young guys and cheer them as they slowly overcame the wily veterans and their backstage politics to become main eventers. Unfortunately for both Russo and WCW, the creative control of the veterans, the bad booking and the outright refusal of people like Hulk Hogan to put over people like Billy Kidman, the angle backfired and the fans cheered the veterans. Upper WCW management quickly pulled the plug once they realised that the angle was not doing what it needed to do, i.e. rescue the ratings. Although the angle failed miserably (one might even say epically), the tendency to lay the blame for said failure squarely at the doorstep of Mr. Russo is not a just one. He was scuppered not by bad planning, but by a group of old wrestlers who were desperate to hang on to their position on the card.

Fast forward 8 years. Russo is once again in charge of the second-biggest promotion in the country, and once again has been charged with vitalising the ratings. Having been roundly criticised for trying his normal tricks with swerves, pole matches and juvenile humour, he decided to try his hand at an angle that should have worked before. This time it would have the added bonus of working with two accusations that fans had levelled at TNA for years: overuse of veterans AND over-pushing of former WWE talent. Russo knew that the theory behind the angle was sound; it just needed some tweaks in execution. And tweak it he did. The Main event Mafia-Front Line angle is the best-booked thing in TNA since the switch to Spike TV. It started off pretty rocky, with the fans still cheering Sting above all and not quite sure how to handle the fact that perennial favourites AJ Styles and Samoa Joe were showing him so much disrespect. Russo stuck to his guns, and with a slow build and some good talk segments the factions took shape and are now driving the show. It is no coincidence that Impact enjoyed 2 consecutive weeks of 1.2 ratings as this angle was really picking up steam. It did drop the next week, but it was opposite a huge NFL game. The angle has its detractors, but they are mainly sourpusses who will crap on anything TNA does, either because it’s not WWE or just because it’s TNA. The Main Event Mafia needed to dominate the early exchanges, mainly by cheating and trickery (Russo specialties), in order to establish their role in the feud: the veterans desperate to stay on top by any means necessary. The Front Line won their first match of the feud on Impact a couple of weeks back, and promptly suffered a beatdown of biblical proportions, with Sting managing to correct one of the issues with the feud and take part in the carnage. Could the much-maligned Russo have learned his lessons and come up with an extended, coherent and well-planned story? Possibly, but how about we find another example?

Showing he’s better than others

In 2004, WWE took a bold step when they tried to capitalise on rampant anti-Muslim sentiments in the Western world by introducing an Arab-American wrestler (Muhammad Hassan) with his Arab-American manager (Khosrow Daivari). From early vignettes, the plans for the character were to toe the line between face and heel, to win matches cleanly but to cut strong promos about how he was treated unfairly due to the bias of Americans and the stereotyping of all Arabs and Muslims following September 11. These vignettes were excellent in that they told a story of a man who was just like any other, except for his racial roots and religious beliefs. Having debuted, the angle became more and more the typical “evil foreigner” gimmick, and of course the fans turned on it and on him. The cherry on the cake was the tragedy in London in July of 2005, when public transit across the city was attacked by suicide bombers. Days before, WWE had taped an angle with Hassan and the Undertaker, with Hassan summoning goons in ski masks, camo pants and dark clothing to beat Taker with clubs and piano wire. Hassan then applied the Camel Clutch (another sign that his character was degrading to the stereotypical evil foreigner) to Taker before the goons carried him off. The episode of Smackdown was set to air scant hours after the attacks, leaving WWE with insufficient time to pull the segment. Despite having developed something of a cult following, and being tremendously over with the fans, UPN forced WWE to pull the gimmick after a huge mass media backlash.

Russo had nothing to do with the Hassan angle, but when TNA signed Daivari following the World X Cup in 2008, Russo saw an opportunity to right another wrestling wrong. The angle was once again sound in theory, but it had been executed badly because the fans were slow to take to the character. The fans just didn’t know how to react to a clean-cut foreigner, a character that they wanted to hate so badly but who was speaking the truth in his vignettes and really had given them nothing to hate in the ring. WWE lost patience with the fan reaction, which any fool could have seen was going to be slow to start with until the fans figured out how they felt about this revolutionary idea. Russo took the idea and tweaked it a little, mainly to account for the time elapsed since September 11. Daivari, now rechristened, errr perhaps I should say renamed Sheik Abdul Bashir, started his promos as an angry foreigner who took things too far. He talked about raping Mother America, and his theme music started with the sound effect of a low-flying airplane. The uproar was immediate and previously would have triggered a patented Russo U-turn. Once again though, Russo learned. He tamed down the promos, removed the sound effect, and started having Bashir talk about how he lost everything as a result of September 11, despite having had nothing to do with it. He started having run-ins with a referee, which he claimed were due to bias, and started winning matches in questionable fashion. Even some of the referee run-ins were questionable. What this gave us was a true heel who was hated, but also made us uncomfortable because we knew he was right. Once again Russo had taken a gimmick that flopped miserably, made some minor changes and turned it into a success. Better yet, he did it with a mid-card angle, using a smaller wrestler.

New Year’s Resolutions

So if we accept, as we should, that Vince Russo has started to turn around, then how can he continue it? To start with, he can stop trying to find the next Hell in a Cell. Gimmick matches do have a place in wrestling today, and a new one occasionally is welcome, but when you throw a new idea out each month it gets tiring. The Dome was probably the best idea he’s stolen, let’s stick with that one for now. He could also do with resisting the urge to turn people who are feuding or about to feud into tag teams. It’s not funny, it’s not clever and we’ve seen it all before. What you’re doing right now is working, by and large, and if you can stay on the same track then maybe, just maybe, TNA will break a 1.3 rating this decade.

No UnSerious this week as I have been totally out of the wrestling news loop. It will return, have no fear. Until next Tuesday, Stay Cool and Rock Hard.

Lansdellicious – Out.