Posted in: The Northern Star The Northern Star--Course Correction
By XanMan
Nov 11, 2009 - 12:11:09 AM
{Argument: So it ends. Not The Northern Star, friends, please don't worry about that. I may be writing daily, but I still intend to pull the old ship out from time to time when there's a long topic I believe warrants discussion. Hence the arrival today upon your shores. No, the ending I refer to is the amoral blueness that has pervaded the last few columns. Today was to be BeyondKnight's last Star to ruin, but as he didn't respond to my email of the column, I consider my bet finally paid and the Star returned to its former glory. }
"The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity."--Andre Gide
Okay, I admit it. I used to be a complete mark for Total Nonstop Action, and even now after all the stupid things they've done that pissed me off over the last few years, there's still a spark in me that wants to see them overtake the big bad WWE. See, as much as I enjoy watching World Wrestling Entertainment (and God how I do still despise that name) there are times...and times...and times that I wish it was stricken from my television. Lately a lot of that time has come when Hornswoggle, the guest host du jour, and possibly even Santino are on-screen. I'm not going to sit here and rehash all my old complaints about WWE constantly choosing what they believe is comedy over wrestling as their preferred form of delivering entertainment. What would be the point of that?
I've said what I have to say on the matter, and I have a daily platform with which I can keep bitching about the idiocy they advance week in and week out on what is supposedly the flagship show for the largest wrestling organization the world has ever seen. I think one thing that irritates me so much about what WWE now puts out there for those of us who are basically wrestling fans is that they are the largest one and they became that dominant force by running roughshod over all the wrestling territories. We have very limited access to actual professional wrestling on a territorial level because they did everything they could to wipe out the competition and then decided they weren't in the wrestling business.
That's actually a very large part of the reason that I first started watching TNA. WCW was no more. ECW had also vanished. The only entity we had to my knowledge--I hadn't yet heard of Ring of Honor--was the World Wrestling Federation and I was quickly growing tired of watching one product. Smackdown was awesome, but RAW was needlessly boring. Seven years later, the same thing is true, more or less. Same shit, different year, except this time I can't even watch the better show on television because they're on such a limited network that it's not even available in the Duluth, MN area. Pretty ridiculous that WWE has dropped into that position, but they've done it to themselves and have no one else to blame.
The notion that I keep coming back to is that wrestling fans want to watch professional wrestling and it certainly appeared that's what we were going to get from TNA--or NWATNA as it was called at the time. They didn't disappoint. There was sloppiness and spotfests, but there was also--on the promotion's second show ever, mind you--the 4-way double-elimination match to crown the initial X-division champion that was a serious contender for Match of the Year. TNA was putting on such good wrestling that I thought their $10 a week price tag was a bargain. The storylines weren't always wonderful, but they had such character and there was always at least one or two outstanding matches on the show.
If my work schedule was such that I could have watched every week, I would have done so and skipped the WWE shows, which I believe were $29.95 at the time. Yes, folks, I would rather have paid roughly $10 more per month to watch NWATNA's angles than pay the $30 a month to watch the payoff of the WWE feuds we saw unfolding on free TV. Was that wise? I don't know. I don't care. Love is patient and kind, it isn't always wise, and I just didn't like TNA during this time, I loved it and promoted it to any fan of wrestling I knew on the internet and off, even if the ones I knew offline were few and far between. To me, this was the little company that could. I so much wanted them to succeed and offer something different.
"There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves."--Frank Herbert
Ah, my friends, but there's the rub. When NWATNA started, they had a nice mix of old and young stars. Jeff Jarrett was one of the founders, along with his father, so of course he and one of his old cohorts in BG James were going to be in the mix and yeah, they tried to include some celebrities right away in angles that were basically "throwaway to get us noticed" types of things. I specifically remember Toby Keith coming in, performing a song or two, and then having some sort of altercation and I know there were some NASCAR drivers as well, though I'll be damned if I can recall exactly who they were. I'm fairly sure Ernie Sadler was one of them, but really, who cares? The point is they were only brought in for basically one or two shot deals.
TNA wanted to get noticed, because they believed they were offering an alternative to the long-suffering wrestling fan, which was quite a true belief at the time. At a time when Triple H was dominating RAW, guys like Ron "The Truth" Killings and AJ Styles were dynamic NWA World Heavyweight Champions that looked like they could compete for just about any championship in the world, junior or heavyweight. At a time when there was still somewhat of a tag team scene in WWF/E, America's Most Wanted was the greatest tag team in the world. At a time when WWE had turned the cruiserweight division that was once such a large part of their near demise into a joke, the X-division was a burgeoning force.
Ah yes, the X-division. Let's talk about that now, shall we? Did the X-division really do anything the cruiserweight division hadn't done years before in WCW? Yes, it did. Eric Bischoff knew by bringing in the high flying luchador style he'd have a great way of drawing in viewers that were tired of or just plain didn't like the big names he brought into be part of the hottest angle in the history of wrestling--the NWO--or even before that when it was The Giant vs. Flair or Hulk Hogan vs. Lex Luger. Bischoff has made his mistakes, but give credit where it's due. For quite awhile it seemed like he had his pulse on the North American wrestling scene and everything he touched turned to gold.
However, while he did bring in the cruisers and give them their own division, and for a short time even a cruiserweight tag team title that saw the first national television appearance by current TNA World Heavyweight Champion and X-division pioneer, AJ Styles, he mostly saw the cruiserweights as undercard performers who were there to draw in the people that his main event couldn't and warm up the crowd for what was to follow. This mistake is one reason why he ended up losing to Vince McMahon when first Chris Jericho and then Dean Malenko, Chris Benoit, and Eddie Guerrero got sick of the politics and made the jump over to the World Wrestling Federation.
NWATNA, though, embraced what were formerly known as cruiserweights as being just as important to the organization as any other division. Whether the World Heavyweight Champion was wrestling on the card or not didn't matter. The best match on the card was going to be the main event and more often than not, that was a match involving X-division performers. Because they mattered. Jeff Jarrett may be an arrogant prick who thinks his shit doesn't stink, but he knew--at least back then--that he wasn't a huge draw and he knew that his product had to offer something different from the WWF in order to succeed, so he gave the wrestling audience great matches in all divisions and didn't relegate the tag teams or the X-division to the undercard.
"Man is an idiot. He doesn't know how to do anything without copying, without imitating, without plagiarizing, without aping. It might even have been that man invented generation by coitus after seeing the grasshopper copulate."--Augusto Roa Bastos
This is obviously no longer the case and is there really anyone that can say that TNA is better for it? Sure, they now have a national television deal, but their ratings are still generally right around the same as the lowest rated WWE show and long-time fans of the organization *ahem-hem* really hate the way that the X-division has devolved into an afterthought in the last three years. TNA is trying to make itself think it's big enough to compete with WWE, but it's not. Even if it was, why would they want to compete with Vince McMahon by doing exactly the same type of things that he does? A lot of people have compared TNA to the final days of WCW because of their roster, but I don't buy it.
Sure, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Jeff Jarrett, Sting, and Scott Steiner were there in the waning days of World Championship Wrestling, but NEWSFLASH: They were also there when the organization was at its most prosperous. People seem to forget that. To me the problem with Total Nonstop Action isn't that they have old school wrestlers on the roster at the main event level. The problem is simply that they have a main event level. I know this sounds radical coming from an old school purist such as myself, but with or without Hulk Hogan, TNA is never going to compete with WWE by trying to be WWE. I don't think they've quite figured it out yet, though it certainly seems plain to me.
So what do I suggest? Going in the opposite direction, of course. The WWE passes their titles around like candy to trick or treaters; or if you want a more literal analogy, they pass them around like the props they know they are rather than the symbols of prestige they should be to the outside audience. This means TNA should strive to assure that winning and retaining a title in TNA feels like a real accomplishment, and that title reigns--and thus, multiple reigns by one person--are few and far between. It also means, though, that as counterintuitive as it sounds, TNA was right to break away from the National Wrestling Organization and wrong to create their own World Title in its place. Yeah, I said it. And I'll say it again. Wait a second.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling was wrong to create a World Heavyweight Title to replace the NWA World Heavyweight Title as the top title in their promotion. Since I don't want anyone misunderstanding what I'm trying to say here, I'm going to be a bit redundant because this idea is what we've been leading up to since the start of the column and what TNA should have been leading up to since the inception of the promotion. TNA should not, I repeat: should not, have a World Heavyweight Championship. If you are willing to accept that rationale, then the rest of this becomes easy. If you're not, then ask yourself one simple question: Why does TNA need a World Heavyweight Champion?
Using the socratic method, the answer becomes clear: "I don't know, why does any wrestling organization need a World Heavyweight Champion?" Certainly the term sounds impressive, but what does it really mean? Isn't the term "heavyweight" pretty subjective on its own, especially in a fake sport? There's no doubt that World Wrestling Entertainment is now a global entity, but how often are their championships defended outside of the United States? And out of the times that they are, what percentage of those are actually outside of North America? I'm not going to do research, because that would be dry, boring work that's better left to the wooly friends among us. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the percentage is very, very low.
"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds. It is something one creates."--Thomas Szasz
TNA needs to stop trying to be like WWE and do everything they can to be as unlike WWE as possible. WWE wants to be PG, which means TNA shouldn't be. That's one reason why I'm so much enjoying Desmond Wolfe's arrogant, brutal destruction of Kurt Angle and Scott Steiner's sexual advances on Bobby Lashley's wife. They aren't family friendly entertainment, which means TNA has figured out they need to offer the audience something it can't currently get from WWE. Now they need to take it even further and incorporate it into their overall athletic philosophy. Wordsmith, though I may be, I don't know what other term to use for it. TNA needs to be TNA and in order to do that, they need to extend the way they began.
I know a lot of people detest TNA's six-sided ring; I've even heard some go so far as to call it an abomination, but I honestly can't imagine why. Are people actually so afraid of change? When I watch TNA, very rarely do I even notice the ring. I'm usually watching the wrestlers do their thing while I'm listening to the crowd and the announcers. The number of sides of the ring very rarely comes into play and when it does, it's almost always positive. I love the Six Sides of Steel, I think the added angles and areas make the gauntlets more exciting than regular battle royals, that their ring is perfectly built for the X-Division, and there's more mat area due to the design than their original ring. At the moment I can't think of a single thing about it I don't like.
Since the WWE seem incapable of reducing their number of pay per views, TNA should reduce theirs and should only hold them quarterly. Recently it's come out that they intend to raise the price of future events to $34.95. That's a ridiculous fee for what they currently offer, especially considering their low number of pay per view buys and the fact that they used to offer eight hours of a substantially more appealing product for $5 more than what they want you to pay for three hours now. I say they should keep their new price tag, but have tremendous events that are built up over a few months instead of weeks, give the viewers a tremendous payoff, and get wrestling fans talking. In other words: make pay per views special again.
It should reorganize itself into four strict divisions that rarely, if ever, overlap. Why? Because they have a large enough roster that there's no reason for overlapping. How are we supposed to take the Motor City Machine Guns seriously as a tag team when they're competing for the X-Division Title, and how can we think they'll battle each other full out in a single's match if they're supposed to be a unit? TNA already has divisions created that take advantage of promoting things WWE really doesn't: tag teams, cruiserweights, and female wrestlers. That's perfect and the only things that I would change are the aforementioned overlapping and moving guys back into that division that belong there.
Jay Lethal, Consequences Creed, Samoa Joe, and yes, even current WHC AJ Styles should all be placed back in the X-Division. That's where those guys shine, and again, in case I haven't made it clear enough, this isn't a demotion. The fourth division isn't going to be a heavyweight division where they're above everybody else. The WHC belt is no longer and we're going to rename the already recently renamed "Global Championship" to the Traditional Wrestling Championship. One organization, four equal divisions with their respective roster members, each getting equal time, and the matches always going in order from least to best in terms of anticipated quality. Sound like a dream world? So far it is, but TNA should make it become a reality sooner than later. Will they die if they don't do this? I don't know, but they have the chance to thrive if they do.
Long days, pleasant nights
You can send any comments by email to me at XanManX@hotmail.com with the words "Northern Star" or "feedback" in the subject line; or, if you're a member of the LoP Forums you can click here to leave feedback, as well.
