The Rise & Fall Of TNA | Wrestling Timelines

36. June 19, 2002 | The First Weekly PPV

The brand new NWA:TNA proves the advertising industry right at its first dance. 

The very name of the promotion poses an immediate problem that will haunt the company for years and years. It’s an oxymoron. The old NWA by definition promoted a wide range of styles, but its vintage lineage of World champions enshrines it as a quasi-legitimate, best-of-the-best organisation for the purists. While the NWA association is a licensing deal designed only to “legitimise” the upstart promotion, NWA:TNA is essentially the same thing as ‘Dory Funk, Jr. Presents Tits And Ass’, in that the set of initials creates such dissonance. That is because - in a secret initially kept from commentator Mike Tenay, whose attempt to fancy-up the promotion by wearing a tuxedo is both sweet and laughable - Vince Russo is the booker. This is almost immediately obvious on the weekly PPV debut. (Officially, Russo only joins the promotion in July - but, as Meltzer writes in the July 15 issue of the Observer, “Russo had long been expected to be a secret writer for the group, and had contributed several ideas”.)

In the WWF, Russo’s vision was filtered through Vince McMahon. In WCW, he had to answer to “standards and practices”. NWA:TNA - which debuts at least a full year after Russo’s brand of creative tumbled out of fashion - is Vince Russo uncut, uncooked, uncensored. 

On night one, emanating from Huntsville, Alabama, this is made immediately and agonisingly clear. In a typically meta development that evidences Russo’s hatred for the only industry that will ever let him in, the main eventers agree that it’s a stupid idea to determine a new NWA World champion in a gauntlet battle royal. This happens in the tone-setting opening segment of the first-ever show. There’s a tag team, named the Johnsons, whose gimmick is that they are penises. Brian Lawler talks about “my kind and your kind” in a gross racist angle with Ron Killings. The various scantily-clad women don’t seem to have an actual reason to be there. There is no pretext. You just can’t have a wrestling show without hot chicks who hate one another. 

There is however a spark of something new and good, if you overlook the Elvis impersonator gimmick; in the opener, the Flying Elvises of Jimmy Wang Yang, Jorge Estrada and Sonny Siaki go over AJ Styles, Low Ki and Jerry Lynn. The match goes just six minutes, but it’s a lightspeed thriller - the first glimpse of a TNA that might one day be loved. 

The company haemorrhages money doing a parody of the parody that was late-stage WCW. It’s not looking good.