When TNA first started, I knew they were a spe­cial orga­ni­za­tion. They had a unique and inno­v­a­tive prod­uct that intro­duced us to guys like AJ Styles, Christo­pher Daniels, CM Punk, Abyss, Beer Money, Triple X, Amaz­ing Red and count­less other bright young tal­ents. Over time TNA evolved from a niche com­pany to an estab­lished brand. They went from weekly PPV’s to TNA Impact on Spike TV and have been grow­ing ever since. Over the course of this growth, we have seen some great vet­eran tal­ent come through TNA’s doors. Super­stars like Raven, Sabu, D-Lo Brown, Kid Kash, Chris­t­ian Cage and of course, their best acqui­si­tion was Olympic gold medal­ist Kurt Angle. Most of these vet­er­ans came in and helped the orga­ni­za­tion as well as helped make stars out of TNA’s young talent.

Recently though, some­thing hap­pened that has made TNA stand­out to a larger audi­ence - that being the involve­ment of Hulk Hogan & Eric Bischoff. While I appre­ci­ated the fact that Hogan was involved in grow­ing a new pro­mo­tion and even adding some main­stream media expo­sure to the brand, I was con­cerned about the appear­ances of some less than desir­able wrestlers that would jeop­ar­dize the growth of TNA’s home grown tal­ent. Hogan suc­ceeded in bring­ing in some new blood, but, mixed in with the old were Hogan flunkies and older wrestlers that frankly have no place in the pro­mo­tion. Over the last few weeks, TNA has become a mish mosh of 1990 WWE Atti­tude Era + WCW/NWO, which has turned me off from the prod­uct a bit. Now, often times I hear wrestlers say that “marks” know noth­ing about the busi­ness and should stop try­ing to know every­thing. Sadly in some cases they have a point. Nonethe­less, I wanted to take the chance to do a lit­tle arm­chair book­ing and give my own take on how I’d change TNA. Enjoy.

• Keep Hogan as an on-air, non-wrestling tal­ent but keep the TV time minimal.
• Eric Bischoff is best suited to work behind the scenes and help grow the prod­uct with­out hog­ging the spotlight.
• Kevin Nash should be involved with Hogan in a GM-type role.
• Mick Foley should work back­stage with the tal­ent and help them improve. His TV appear­ances should be few and far between.
• Ric Flair should con­tinue with AJ Styles as I see that part­ner­ship hav­ing potential.
• Christo­pher Daniels needs to be in the main event scene and even hold the title at some point.
• Samoa Joe should be in the title pic­ture often, as his matches with AJ & Daniels are without-a-doubt classics.
• Pope D’Angelo Dinero is ready for the main event - let’s move him up a few pegs.
• There should be a TV Title to free up space in the X-Division.
• Build your X-Division around Amaz­ing Red, Homi­cide, Doug Williams, Syxx Pac (If he’s going to stay clean) and Suicide.
• I would not have released Petey Williams.
• Main­tain the seri­ous edge in the Knockout’s divi­sion. Avoid going into WWE ter­ri­tory with gim­mick matches.
• No Scott Hall – Huge fan but he adds noth­ing to the product.
• Raven needs to be in TNA for his great mic work and also for those extreme matches with Abyss & Rhino.
• Don’t lose sight of your Tag Divi­sion and make the best in the world. That means no Nasty Boys!!!
• Why is Orlando Jor­dan there? Boot him.
• Sign Rob Van Dam to add some spice to the X-Division and World Title scene.
• Estab­lish a work­ing rela­tion­ship with for­eign pro­mo­tions and show­case their tal­ent against TNA tal­ent. Great way to learn things
• Keep the 6-sided ring to dif­fer­en­ti­ate your­selves from the competition.
• Cre­ate a devel­op­men­tal pro­gram to help cur­rent tal­ent improve and younger tal­ent become better.
• Macho Man should man­age Jay Lethal. Makes for a com­pelling sto­ry­line but it needs to have a solid pay­off to ele­vate Jay.

If I con­tinue this post will be way too long. Nonethe­less, these things are but small steps toward mak­ing TNA a legit threat to WWE.

What do you folks think?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the com­ments below.

Matches con­sisted of two numb­nuts kick­ing each other in ter­ri­ble fash­ion while a ref­eree stops the action with every clean hit as the fight­ers score points.

Wasn’t a true test of skill or abil­ity, just a few clean hits landed being tal­lied until some­one kicked you in the chest enough times to become the winner.

Watch­ing box­ing was a man hug­ging fest unless cruis­er­weights were fight­ing, and even then, it was mainly bor­ing, long, drawn out fights that went all the way to 12 rounds.

So what could pro­vide all the fun of sports and the enter­tain­ment value of an inter­est­ing sto­ry­line as in movies, the­ater and TV shows?

Wrestling!

I’ve been a fan of wrestling since as far back as I can recall, though I was on and off dur­ing my later teen years, I’ve been a die-hard fan of Wrestling, mainly WWE , since Hogan was the man, through the Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels days, and now when guys like John Cena and Triple H are the top dogs and wrestling is way more enter­tain­ing than sports.

I’ve seen wrestling go through its ups and downs through­out the years from sto­ry­lines and episodes as bor­ing as life­time movies to epic matches and shows as excit­ing as big Hol­ly­wood blockbusters.

The point of this lit­tle col­umn, for lack of a bet­ter word, is to just point out a few com­par­isons between the wrestling when we were kids, and the wrestling we see on TV now and start-up a point of dis­cus­sion on them.

To begin, I’ll point out some big­ger issues right off the bat.

One of the prob­lems back then, in the 80’s, early 90’s, was under expo­sure, decent wrestlers were always knocked off air time in favor of less tal­ented, big name wrestlers, for exam­ple, Ricky Steam­boat was 10 times the per­former Hogan was, but also 10 times worse on the mic and charisma scale. Let’s keep it real, Hogan sold tick­ets, despite the fact that he really had the worst wrestling moves ever.

Steam­boat prob­a­bly couldn’t carry the show as well in that regard.

There were also less shows aired back then, Before RAW, I think on Sat­ur­day nights they had the main event, and on Sat­ur­day morn­ing they’d air WWF Super­stars which was mainly generic wrestlers get­ting beaten up by mid to low card performers.

You’d never see a major player there and no one cared for the “real” wrestlers, any of them that were really stand­ing out didn’t really get much air time on the big­ger shows, so they’d be off the radar faster than anything.

Now one of the main things that pisses me off is over­ex­po­sure of pro­gram­ming and writ­ers still under uti­liz­ing real talent.

But it’s not as bad as it could be, I guess….

With the pro­gram­ming, it’s ridicu­lous, on my last count, there are like four WWE shows a week, RAW, Smack­down, ECW and AM RAW on Sat­ur­day morn­ings, not to men­tion that there’s a PPV at least once a month, some months two PPV’s, such as Jan­u­ary and April.
It’s nuts.

It used to be that there was only five big PPV’s in a year, and those were HUGE events, not just beefed up episodes of their reg­u­lar weekly episodic pro­gram­ming shit.

There was the Royal Rum­ble, Wrestle­ma­nia, King of the Ring, Sum­mer­Slam, and Sur­vivor series, and these events were where titles changed hands, rival­ries were begun, ended and man­aged, and excit­ing moments were the norm.

Now it’s just a venue to exchange titles when needed, at the mas­sive and fre­quent costs of pay­ing customers.

I’ll have you know, titles used to be exchanged every now and then on episodes of RAW, I haven’t seen that in ages, last time was when RVD lost it to Edge after win­ning it from Cena at ECW One night stand quite a few years ago.

Now , never.

In the case of under uti­liz­ing tal­ent, it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be, but you’ll notice that obvi­ously, the major play­ers are the main focus, guys like Evan Bourne show up for a 3 minute match and that’s the end of it for the next 1–2 weeks, no real push from the writ­ers, despite the stel­lar performance.

Guys like Randy Orton, Cena and Edge, while they do put on great shows, aren’t tak­ing the risks that the newer tal­ent is, and there­fore, are becom­ing tire­some to watch.

I do feel Wrestling has evolved, it still has it’s bor­ing shows as well as it’s great ones, and though there’s not much to watch in terms of brand name since WWE owns every­thing, and it’s either WWE or TNA, no more WCW, ECW, etc, just one or the other, it’s still good stuff , and has recently been get­ting a lot bet­ter in com­par­i­son to a few months ago.

I do wish they’d cut the damn PPV’s down, since you waste 40–50 bucks each month (or more) only to be dis­ap­pointed at how shitty the event was.

Aside from that, at least now there are tons of top guys, totally not like the hand­ful as in the old days, now we have top dog heels as well as top dog faces, so you aren’t lim­ited to either Hogan or Ulti­mate War­rior (Face) or who­ever their enemy was at the time.

Remem­ber the divas back then?

My god, now they are actu­ally hot, before they were pretty damn aver­age at best, if not down­right ghastly.

I also remem­ber for a time, all the main even­ters were lard asses like Yokozuna, Mabel, Tug­boat, Earth­quake, now it’s all about the jacked bodies.

I couldn’t get through an episode of raw with­out hav­ing man tits jig­gled in my face for half the show and win­ning the WWE title only depended on how fat and heavy a super­star was and whether or not the top Face can lit his fat ass, or be squashed under his weight.

It kind of sucked for a time dur­ing the 90’s because of that dis­gust­ing shit.

Get­ting down to the meat of it all though, I would def­i­nitely say it’s bet­ter today than yes­ter­day, but a few things need to be changed, as I pointed out above , and with that in place, wrestling can become even greater than ever.

That’s my take.

What’s the gen­eral con­sen­sus from the crowd, what sign are you hold­ing up on this subject?