El-P

Up there with "The new F'N show" in ECW. Or "Bite me !" in WCW.

Sabin still does nothing for me. He's all spots, works too fast, isn't a good seller. This is typically the kind of X div match I don't care about. Spot spot spot spot spot. Ki does manage to drag me into the match for the last stretch and I did enjoy the finish which was a nice touch instead of just keeping on overdrive and overkill, but Sabin as champ feels like such a setback after those great AJ vs Daniels vs Joe matches the previous year. The concussion angle was stupid especially when Rhino kicked out of Christian's finisher on their last match. Concussion = nothing. Really a tedious match too, as Rhino isn't someone you want for long control segments, in or out of the ring. He had such a terrific out of control brawling match with Monty & Samoe Joe before, this was just going nowhere with boring crowd brawling, useless vehicule use and such. Christian has worked much better as an underdog solid babyface than vicious heel. Plunder match felt like nothing after the crazy (and stupid) garbage brawl earlier on with Abyss, Raven, Joe and some human dart. Finish was idiotic (always hated those "stack a bunch of stuff on a body then hit them with a chair, it hurts less than a simple chair shotso why would you do that ?). A few spots here and there, but really a nothing match. Jarrett & Sting had a more satisfying one despite the flat work. Very good match. Those two spots were kinda insane. What the fuck was Hernandez thinking ? He also shows his greenness at points, but it's mostly what it should be. These guys have been carrying the promotion in the last few months, as you can feel the momentum slowly doing and the booking getting worse and worse. This show really felt flat overall. It's quite fitting as it was the ending of TNA as an alternative. The first year of Spike was super easy and fun to watch until Slammiversary 96. Since that point you can see booking becoming tired. Sure, Angle was a coup and would get them their best PPV score ever, but it wouldn't last. It would be the last successful one-shot for a company that would now be booked by Vince Russo into oblivion and irrelevancy. After storylines that made sense, simple and solid booking with regular great matches, it would be time for fucked-up shit, pushing Joe, Daniels & AJ styles back from the top spots and pushing every WWE rejects ever. Then would come Bischoff and Hogan with even more stupid shit. In 2005 & for most part of 2006, TNA looked like a hot promotion still full of promises. Russo coming in was the end of the party. It never recovered, at no point. From this point on, I guess it's cherry picking only... Was fun while it lasted. D'Amore deserves credits for making it work for a while.

Terrific Ultimate X match. This gimmick delivers almost every time. Nice twist with the tag team dynamic, although it was indeed a bomb throwing fest. Great chaotic feel like in every LAX match. The final bump was insane and Daniels deserves so much props for attempting it. It should be noted that it was a spot that *made sense* too, unlike 99% of the stupid stunts from most gimmick matches since the awful Hardy's "classic" matches. It was not a regular X either of course, as this time the crossing of the ropes was attached solidly to the roof. Excellent match with an all-time memorable finish.

No, because he was a guy from another promotion, not "evil boss".

Not hard to be better than Trip, Stephy or, gasp, Dixie. But it's a role that has totally hampered my enjoyment of US pro-wrestling. Blame Bischoff I guess (gotta give the devil its due, he did it before Vince and was quite good at it too). Wait. The expection being of course DARIO MF CUETO, who's not even in the same league.

For a few months facing Austin. And then it jumped the shark quickly. Vince was awesome at the beginning of the Austin feud. By "It was me all along !", I was already dead tired of him. When he was still around a few years later facing Hulk Hogan on an equal footing, it was completely ridiculous.

Thanks for the clarifications and infos ! I totally agree by Slammiversary you can feel the first signs of burnout. The King of the Mountain finish being the first real bad stain on the booking. The Jackass stuff was so bad you could almost think Russo was already writing, although I believe he was not given the reigns before the move to prime time after BFG that year (2006).

See : Angle vs Joe, part 2. Their first match was a classic, basic build with them not touching, mostly put together by Mantell. It made TNA its biggest PPV number. The follow-up was classic Russo hotshotting and bullshit, which was the beginning of the end for Joe after a tremendous year and a half.

Are we going to pretend the 3:16 promo isn't vital to Austin eventually becoming the biggest thing around ? Just because the WWF didn't picked on it immediately ? To answer the bolded part : because he didn't. He didn't book alone during that period. Hell, like Charles said, Corny was around until as late as 1998, when the turnaround was already done and Austin was the hottest thing. Pritchard was also there. And of course, Vince himself. The filters aren't overstated. I'm not saying he didn't contribute, but Russo without filter got exposed immediately, and le's not go into "oh, but he couldn't do what he wanted in WCW" since it was the exact same shit in TNA. When you're a failure 95% of your whole career, when you can spot the patterns of his whole "creative spectrum" after going through his stints in details (and yeah, I've done that both for WCW and early TNA, the masochist that I am), it's easy to expose his way of thinking and writing. It's not like he's that creative to begin with (the word "creative" is so overrated anyway, especially in pro-wrestling). There's probably something to be said about some of his ideas going through the Vince filter, working with Austin & Rock & Foley, simply being repeated everywhere else because the guy had no notion of why it worked before (context, worker). Which is another proof, if needed, he's a clueless idiot.

The part I bolded reads like a pro-Russo argument, considering Russo started out with 1996 WWF and not 1998 WWF. Not at all. Russo has jackshit to do with Austin cutting his 3:16 promo. And Cornette was still on the writing team as late as mid-1997 FWIW. The only guy who believes Russo created Austin & The Rock is Russo himself. He's been a proven failure for 15 years straight in two major companies (on every level). Who the fuck cares about what this dumbfuck has to say in 2017 anyway ? No, the real heel-freezes-over stuff about this whole deal is to see Cornette on the Network alongside Eric Bischoff...

It's a wee bit easier to draw money when you work in the WWF under Vince MacMahon working with the two biggest stars ever, arguably, in the hottest period for pro-wrestling ever than when you do things on your own on a regional level during the worst period ever for pro-wrestling and you have Brian Lee & Tracy Smothers as aces. Wait, SMW did draw money for a while. So there.

They have nothing in common *at all*. Cornette and Heyman are the different sides of the same coin (for better and worse). Russo has no clue whatsoever.

Cornette is also a terrific host of KC's Back to the Territories as he's a true wrestling historian with a passion for pro-wrestling golden days, was a great manager (the greatest ?) for 15 years, one of the best promo ever, promoted a cool throwback territory in the 90's in SMW. No matter how much bullshit he can spill out at times (this is pro-wrestling, who doesn't spill bullshit ?), there shouldn't even be an argument. Russo, for fuck's sake...

I don't get to do my WCW Highway to Hell thread. Which is my best writing about pro-wrestling. So that would be a loss. Of sorts.

I miss WCW. That's probably why I'm going through TNA TV instead of watching old territory stuff or "cool" indies of today, or NJ, or lucha. This. Kudos to her. I wonder how Mickie James would do in the role.

Would be better than anyone on the booth currently. Lita can't be worst at announcing that she was at wrestling.

I had been a fan of Lioness stuff with Kyoko and Jaguar in Neo & JD' in the late 90's, but by this point, Lioness was exposed to me as a selfish, formulaic worker with no interest putting anyone over or work toward the strenght of her opponent. This was good because Yoshida can't seem to have a bad match and Lioness formula basically garantees a basic level of action, but this is Lioness taking over with her usual bullshit. Death spiral indeed. And oh, yeah, Chama couldn't give a fuck at this point. Totally forgot about that LCO match too, and I'm like the biggest LCO mark (hell, I take some credit for people using the acronym LCO), that tells you my interest in the promotion, and soon joshi puroresu, had been gone.

As far as when the question of the thread was actually asked (damn, 10 years), it strikes me as I just reached the point when Russo was hired back as a writer that after about one year of very good, easy to watch, pro-wrestling TV which included tons of very good to great matches and booking that made sense and also a feeling of momentum (for a while) thanks to some actual stars showing up (Christian Cage, Team 3D, Sting), it took exactly ONE SHOW under Russo to get a "This is stupid !" chant from the audience. And it was not even during the match (an X-div match mind you) that involved laxatives. Under D'Amore's booking, especially with the move on Spike TV, TNA really was a cool little alternative promotion for a while. It did began to slow down during the summer of 06, especially around Slammiversary, but there were still really good stuff afterward. Then Russo is hired back. And we get laxatives and some shit involving a blow-up doll that incites a "This is stupid !" chant from the everloving TNA Asylum crowd. Up to that point, despite some truly awful stuff (from, yeah, Russo already, but also Dusty Rhodes who's stint as a booker there was pretty terrible), those D'Amore 15 months or so would absolutely prevent TNA from being called the worst promotion ever. Nothing touches WCW under Russo. I should know. Still, the fact that question was asked just a few months after that idiot came back to sink the promotion is pretty telling. The fact It took so long to never improve and never become relevant since then is also amazing. So, all this to say that, no, in 2007, TNA had not been the worst promotion ever, not by a long shot. 10 years of irrelevancy and stupid decisions one after another after that point... well, it's a long history of nothingness indeed.

That's a helluva quote right there. Quote of the year. I third this.

That episode on Fall Brawl 97. Epic stuff.

(edit, me not reading right, it's late over here ) Agree with all you said there.

That's not the only word or expression I think fits this angle. "Racist beating" comes to mind also. Probably more literal indeed, without the "death" implication, which always sounds odd when you talk about pro-wrestling, I will admit.

Wrestling is about representation. It was a bunch of wrestlers portrayed as both good and evil all ganging up on one (and the only) muslim character, beating him up together while people loudly chanted USA ! USA ! in the crowd. Make of that what you will in term of representation. Use whatever word best suited to you for this scene and what it was figuratively depicting (of course they didn't kill the guy, no shit). And no, the "heel" argument doesn't work, because all the other heels ganged up on the guy too, which made it quite the exceptionnal case of *everybody* teaming up to beat up one guy for one specific reason. Even in the jingoist days of Hogan, such of thing wasn't happening (Savage helped evil Iraki sympathiser turncoat to win the title just to fuck the Warrior). So what was portrayed here went further than just "groupe of guys eliminating another one from a battle royal". Anyway, this goes into "racist shit" thread in the MIS.

When every wrestler in the ring, faces or heels, stop all action, turn to one guy and beat him up collectively basically because he was "the muslim guy", that's called *lynching*. Lynching doesn't need hanging to be lynching. I guess in the Attitude era they would have Taker put him on his "symbol" too maybe. Anyway. This was gross, offensive and easily one of the lowest point ever of WWE TV. Anyway. Back to the India business, how ironic it is that 20 years after he vaunted *huge signing* of Tiger Ali Singh as the next WWE superstar, they actually have made their Indian heel champion and he's from Canada too ! Jinder is better in the ring that Tiger Ali, but who isn't ?

The lynching (there's no other word) of Hassan at that Royal Rumble is the most shocking, racist thing WWE ever produced. Just wrong and hateful. I can't believe they got away with this shit back then. (of course, the fact that Hassan was actually Italian and his manager was from Iran tells a lot about how well WWE people know or care about the world)