5 Most Insane Things Happening In Wrestling Right Now (March 1)
From Conrad to Con-man once more.
TNA, through its very name—it is a pun on T*ts And Ass’, if you weren’t aware—has always been something of a joke. It doesn’t matter if it is no longer named TNA anymore. Impact Wrestling, Global Force Wrestling Presents Impact Wrestling, whatever; the t*ts in charge, sipping from an apparently cursed chalice, will always, always make asses of themselves.
Even when promoting state-of-the-art attractions, performed incredibly by influential talents, the company cultivated a laughable stigma. As thirsty for that osmosis WWE credibility as JR is for Kaitlyn on Twitter—“Slobberknocker” was a very apt catchphrase, in hindsight—TNA ritually invited scorn. AJ Styles cosplayed as Ric Flair. The former New Age Outlaws became the Voodoo Kin Mafia, and offered one million dollars to Vince McMahon as encouragement to send Triple H and Shawn Michaels to Orlando. Dixie Carter actually froze the funds.
As the mother and father of TNA, Carter and Russo were about as effective as the Brobergs.
Much of the stink resulted from Vince Russo’s catastrophic stint with the booking pen—and even when it was prised from his grasp, he remained on board in a clandestine consultant role. The company kept this from Spike TV, because Spike TV came to detest the man for reasons that should be obvious.
TNA wasn’t the only dumbsh*t Vince Russo acronym. In 2004, he returned in an onscreen capacity as the Director of Authority. So that’s ‘DOA’, then: a very fitting metaphor for the company itself.
Somehow, the ghost of Russo’s ineptitude still haunts it…
5. LOLTNA, Part 3437345
Impact Wrestling has somehow managed to remain in existence throughout of all this. A cockroach—and Russo definitely pitched that name for a Val Venis/Rob Van Dam tag team—its days might actually, finally be numbered in light of an astonishing, recently unearthed development.
Jeff Jarrett in conjunction with his Global Force Entertainment company last week filed a $4.8 million lawsuit against Impact Wrestling and Anthem Entertainment after Impact had not returned to him the master tapes of GFW’s Amped TV shows. Impact claimed the tapes no longer exist, and wrote to Jarrett on November 30, 2018 to explain why:
“The 16 one-hour episodes of Global Force Wrestling Amped content sought in this question no longer exist. It was deleted in the normal course of business, long before the onset of this litigation, in order to free up storage space on Anthem Wrestling’s systems.”
Why this footage wasn’t exported to a RAID, Christ only knows. The mentality is at once brainless and laughable. The thought “Let’s just get rid of Jeff’s old bullsh*t” definitely went through some dope’s mind, and what’s ironic is that, had somebody thought of that in 2005, it might have saved—and not destroyed—the company.
Jarrett handed over the tapes as part of the abandoned GFW/Impact merger. He could, theoretically, have sold the footage to WWE for use on the Network: Hidden Gems, archive footage to map the trajectory of a star on a future documentary— anything, really.
Poring over the spoilers of that footage makes for wonderful reading. It may yet cost $4.8 million Impact definitely does not have—$2 million more than the net income WWE generated in all of 2013—for matches like Chris Masters Vs. Curt Hawkins and Jigsaw Vs. Sonjay Dutt.