5 Most Insane Things Happening In Wrestling Right Now (Sept 21)
Low attendances, lowbrow cheap heat tactics, low expectations.
IMPACT Wrestling President Ed Nordholm isn't very good at spin.
Doing the Bound For Glory press rounds, he demonstrated a galling lack of PR credentials in a recent interview with the Ottawa Citizen. "[The venue we've chosen is] a great facility," he began. For senior citizen breakfasts; the Aberdeen Pavilion is as much of a wrestling arena as Impact Wrestling - yes, the GFW rebranding has already been dropped - as a wrestling organisation, which is to say hardly. It's going to take a monumental effort to ready the facility for a pro wrestling show. Everything about this company is a*se-backwards. How difficult is it to locate a sporting venue in which to promote a show?
"Our tagline is 'Less Talk More Action,'" he continued, which isn't strictly true. Jim Cornette was installed as a talking television authority figure before the decision to take Bound For Glory to Toronto put the kibosh on it; Cornette isn't permitted to pass through the border without first completing arduous paperwork. Considering Anthem didn't even bother to formalise the merger between Impact and GFW before or after publicly announcing it, the chances of that happening were slim. Cornette is gone. In TNA, it's not a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. The left hand was rebranded as the right hand before they even shook on an agreement.
You can't just state something and have it mainfest as a truth. Well, WWE can...
5. WWE StarrCade
What an oxymoron that is. It just reads wrong, and that's probably because it is.
Of all the old WCW brand names to exhume, the über-patriotic WWE was always going to go with the Great American Bash - which they soon tired of. Since 2009's The Bash, in which an American was dropped harder than Lex Luger circa 1995, WWE has resisted overtures to "bring back!" the old WCW pay-per-view names, with the almost-exception of TV special Clash of the Champions. Those longing for the return of the brilliantly camp Halloween Havoc set design just had to realise that WCW sucked, it always sucked, and that's how WWE blew it out of the water.
Until it needed to borrow its legacy to prop up a house show faced with opposition from a convention. The stars aligned to make it so - the date and the venue may not be entirely accidental - but it feels like grave-robbing a corpse, all the same, purely to cash in on a strand of nostalgia the company actively raged against for years. It's a sad indictment of wrestling history, really; StarrCade was a revolution in pro wrestling, and WWE is sullying its good name - nay, it's legendary name - for a glorified b*stard house show with no immediate plans for even a Network broadcast.
Apparently, WWE plans to raid the intellectual property yet further. This isn't StarrCade. It's Greed, and empty nostalgia generated by company unable to get its New Blood Rising.