Total Non-Stop...Acceptability (10/12/07) --

It’s been a long time since I watched wrestling with any legitimate dedication. When Ted Turner and Vince McMahon put an end to the Monday night war in the Appomattox Courthouse, wrestling lost nearly all of its appeal. WWE has put out a half-assed attempt to make it appear that there are different companies doing battle in the form of their various brands: RAW, Smackdown!, and a third show that is many things, but Extreme Championship Wrestling is not one of them. The confusion over who is on what show, what show airs when, and who is going to be featured on any of the 29 Pay-Per-Views a year makes it almost impossible if you just want to hop into the middle of the WWE calendar and try to get up to speed.

It doesn’t help that their shows are horribly shitty, either.

Terrible wrestling isn’t always a bad thing. On the contrary, the line between terrible wrestling and outstanding wrestling can become quickly blurred, although on a foundation of perverse comedy. I’ve alluded many times to the fact that bad baseball games and lousy quarterbacks may come and go, but truly terrible wresters and wrestling events stay with you forever. I still think WCW Saturday Night should have won an Emmy and that watching Jay Leno wrestle was one of the greatest uses of someone else’s $30 in my life. If you have a colorful enough cast of pathetic characters or angles that are so over-the-top silly that you can’t help but point and laugh, I am being entertained and I will watch. This will lead to me snapping into more Slim Jims and losing more lovehandles with Stacker 2, which I think is the point of advertising-funded television in the first place.

But when the wrestlers are bad in non-humorous ways, when the booking is trying too hard to create heat in impossible situations, and when actual talent is being replaced with seven-foot Iranians, professional wrestling is impossible to stomach. Goofy, dorky, and unintentionally funny bad wrestling is something that I am all for. Boring bad wrestling, however, is one of the worst forms of self-inflicted punishment known to man.

Ladies and gentlemen, Monday Night Raw, 2007.

The last time I seriously watched wrestling was my freshman year of college, when my roommate and I were actively searching for either the next Sting or the next El Dandy over a weekly thirty pack of Keystone. Wrestling in 2002-2003 was decent. It certainly wasn’t 1997 WCW or 1999 WWF, but it passed for entertainment. But by the time I stopped watching, I wrote a column on this website expressing my utter disgust with the climate at that time. I finished the column with this line:

Every time there is a slow news day, one of the news outlets dig up a story about some person celebrating a birthday usually only seen by men in the book of Genesis. Fortunately, Al Roker and Willard Scott weren't around to throw out a, "HEY! Let's all give a hearty TODAY SHOW GREETING-O-RAMA to Enoch, who is celebrating the big Three Six Five today! Wow! Way to go, Big E!" but it's not hard to imagine the hokey it would have been. While Enoch was busy proclaiming that "360 really is the new 340," somebody would have gone out of their way to point out that he hadn't bathed or eaten diseased wildlife since he was 218 and still made it to this insane age. Nobody is living that long anymore, probably because people kill themselves after NBC weathermen keep humiliating them. But the ones that do make it to birthdays that pass as amazing these days, usually get a tagline like, "And she smoked and drank all these years! What a lady!" This would be fine, but I can think of more than fifteen other ways of dying off the top of my head that don't involve tobacco and they all feature Laffy Taffy as the killer. I'm not sure pointing this out is a subtle way of saying that we really wish Joe Camel would make a comeback or if it's just subversive advertising planted by Philip Morris. I really hope that when I turn 24, somebody writes a newspaper article about me that says something like, "The Leonardite made it all the way to 24 and he has been eating real butter instead of margarine or I Can't Believe It's Not Butter for the better part of his life! Way to go, champ!" Just because I've avoided a heart attack to this point despite indulging in cow-related products doesn't mean that I've cheated my way to 24. I've also been known to drive automobiles, play baseball, and juggle flaming machetes - all verified killers of human beings - and yet nobody will go out of their way to mention that in their unlikely birthday tribute to me. Pretty disappointing. I think the moral of this story is that in addition to minty fresh breath and picking up all the chicks in junior high, smoking will also give you media coverage. And the whole time you've been reading this sidebar, I was out buying Virginia Slims. If I'm going to make it into the newspaper, I'm going to make sure everyone knows I am a real man in the process.

Yes, it went all according to plan for Triple H. It’s a sick, disgusting wasteland that he has created, and I am very rapidly tiring of it. It was quickly agreed upon that a TNA purchase was in the near future because anything, any alternative, had to be better than the Farce in Phoenix.

At that time, Total Nonstop Action wrestling was struggling to make it by employing a weekly Pay-Per-View business model. And while I never did get around to ordering a TNA show at that time, it has now blossomed into holding a two-hour time slot in prime time on Spike TV. Since late May, I’ve been TiVo’ing TNA and given it the chance that I vowed to give it in 2003. And quite surprisingly, I really like what I see.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what I like about TNA as opposed to the programming from Titan (do they still call themselves that anymore?) but I will try my best. Here are five things, listed in order from least important to most important, that actually make TNA worth the time to watch it, live or otherwise.

5: The new stars that TNA is attempting to create are actually compelling.

The new guys that Vince McMahon is trying to pimp on his shows are terrible. The Great Khali is an absolute joke, Mr. Kennedy is as boring as his moniker, and Umaga is a really uninteresting melding of Rikishi and Papa Shango that excites me as much as, I don’t know, Mr. Kennedy.

TNA, on the other hand, has some young guys that I seriously look forward to watching. I’m not going to include AJ Styles on this list because he’s been around for awhile, even having had a cup of coffee back in the day in WCW, but if you haven’t seen him, he’s definitely worth the $0 it costs to watch Impact.

In stark contrast to WWE’s stars-in-development, who are building their careers on a solid foundation of unlikeability, TNA’s young guys are pretty exciting. The Motor City Machine Guns might be the most entertaining tag team I’ve ever seen, XXX puts on a great match every time they are out, and Samoa Joe is the sort of cool shoot wrestler that Ken Shamrock was in his prime. While WWE is on their fourth of year of FINALLY trying to get Randy Orton over, Samoa Joe is already established. There’s definitely a reason for that and I can promise you that Vince Russo’s booking isn’t it.

4: The established wrestlers in TNA are better than WWE’s.

TNA has fired some blanks in this regard, for sure. Test was brought in for about a week-and-a-half, which was ten days more than anyone in the free world wanted to see of Test again. Rikishi is inexplicably main-eventing now, even though he’s as washed up as the New Age Outlaws who are positively awful in TNA.

But there are some legit stars with some tread left on the tires. Kurt Angle and Sting are headlining Bound For Glory this weekend, which is TNA’s version of WrestleMania. Considering that I haven’t truly watched wrestling in a dedicated fashion since most realistically, 2000, the following statement might not mean that much. But I’m more excited about the Sting/Angle matchup than I have been about a wrestling match in years. Yeah, the buildup program has sucked, but the match itself promises to be outstanding. I will personally buy a wrestling Pay-Per-View this weekend. I haven’t done that since Dennis Rodman wrestled at Bash at the Beach. Think about that.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Christian Cage. I absolutely hated Christian in his WWF days, dating back to his days in the very forgettable Brood. But Christian in TNA is actually funny and not in an unintentional this-guy-is-a-complete-jackass way. He has combined this with flawless mic work and stellar in-ring performances. It’s not a stretch to say that Christian Cage is the best heel in wrestling today. I know I don’t watch Vince’s promotions enough to truly know, but I have a hard time believing anyone can top what he brings to the table right now.

Overall, it can be summed up this way: John Cena is out with an injury, Shawn Michaels is a cadaver of his 1998 self, and HHH is a complete asshole. Yeah, Kurt Angle vs. Sting might be better than the alternative.

3: There is discernible effort in TNA

Ever since the WWF crushed WCW at spring break, I am fully convinced that they put it on cruise control and have just been cashing paychecks ever since. From the Invasion angle to Randy Orton kicking John Cena’s dad passing as the hot feud of 2007, it’s pretty obvious that nobody gives a shit about the creative direction of WWE anymore.

TNA takes it too far in the other extreme. Things are overbooked to a negative extent pretty often. Kurt Angle vs. Sting was appealing enough that the Olympic gold medalist didn’t need to go to California to beat up Sting’s kid at a football game. The Dudleys can get heat without crapping all over the young tag teams after each match (although why anyone would want to push the Dudleys anymore is completely beyond me.)

The important distinction is that the nitpicking with TNA deals them working too hard. Nobody is going to accuse WWE of that. It is sort of ridiculous that the entire roster would appear on a two-hour show, as astoundingly happened on Impact two weeks ago, but it certainly gives you the impression of a scrappy young promotion doing whatever it can to claw its way into viability. I like that. If they don’t succeed, at least they acted like they fucking cared. Good for them.

2: There is wrestling in TNA

I read somewhere that the most recent edition of Monday Night RAW had twenty minutes of actual ring time during a two hour show. Think about that. There was actual wrestling for only 16.67% of the show. And if Umaga, Khali, or more than half of the roster was involved in any of these matches, then the term “wrestling” is being used very loosely. Imagine if you were in paid attendance that night and essentially what you got with your ticket was the opportunity to not hear what was being said in TitanTron skits. I’d be chanting a lot more than “WHAT?” every time one of the characters talked, that’s for sure.

TNA, conversely, has taken a page from the WCW Cruiserweight division and found guys that actually entertain. The entire X-Division is built around guys that hop, skip, and kick ass in ways that haven’t been seen since Chris Jericho was in his prime. The Motor City Machine Guns are fantastic, guys like Christopher Daniels and Sonjay Dutt are nipping at their heels, and steady performers like Angle, Joe, Cage, and a host of the lesser known characters can be counted on to deliver every time. The majority of a wrestling show should still be wrestling. Using that template, TNA found some guys that are actually good at it. Novel concept.

1: No McMahons

The trivia question that’s going to come out of the Chris Benoit chaos is going to be this: What was the prominent angle at the time that Benoit flipped out and went down in infamy? The answer: Vince McMahon getting killed in a limo explosion. There are few things that sound more unappealing than Vince McMahon getting “killed” in a limo explosion, but I can name one:

Which WWE wrestler is the illegitimate son of Vince McMahon?

Who. Gives. A. Shit.

They built this up as the question to end all questions for over a month apparently, and then paid it off with the answer being Fit Finlay’s midget sidekick. I’m dead fucking serious. Normally this would have been saved by being the good kind of terrible wrestling gimmick, except that it had to involve Vince McMahon again.

I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say that I wish I never saw any of the McMahons on TV again. The prominent angle in WWE invariably has a thick McMahon subplot. Is Shane out to screw Shawn Michaels? Is Stephanie going to get back at John Cena for insulting HHH? How will Jeff Hardy winning the Intercontinental Championship affect Vince’s attempts to find a way to pull his pants down on television for the 956th time?

It’s completely refreshing to watch programs being booked around guys that are actually paid to perform and not people who take away air time simply because they can. I think this is precisely the reason I waited for a non-WWE promotion to surface before I gave wrestling a chance again. Instead of relying on the same tired routine of Vince McMahon playing the top heel, a twenty times better actor like Christian Cage will fill the role instead. Instead dredging out a skeletal Shawn Michaels or a bastard McMahon for a cheap pop, I’d rather watch Chris Sabin backflip and somersault his way into creating legitimate excitement.

TNA isn’t perfect. And maybe it’s just because I’m older, but it’s certainly not like it was back in the mid-90’s heyday. But it is the best attempt at a wrestling show I’ve seen in awhile. The faces you are familiar with are, for the most part, worthy of giving a second look. The new wrestlers engage in a foreign act known as “wrestling” on the show and are good at it, giving the impression that TNA is actually trying to entertain. And finally, there are no McMahons around to turn the broadcasts into their own, unwatchable playground.

If none of that is worthy of your time, that is completely fine. But there is still a silver bullet in TNA's gun. I speak of a man who pulled off the amazing feat of combining “awesomely stupid” and just plain “awesome” into one complete package. That man, for lack of a better video, is Randy Sav…er, “Black Machismo” Jay Lethal. Ooooh yeah, indeed.


The Leonardite