10 Things AEW MUST Do To Compete With WWE
8. Heed The Various, Hilarious Lessons Taught By Impact Wrestling
The TNA roster of 2010 reads as something quite incredible all these years later: A Kurt Angle that could still call himself a wrestling machine, AJ Styles, Bobby Lashley, Hulk Hogan, Bobby Roode, Samoa Joe, Mick Foley, Desmond Wolfe, Ric Flair, Jeff Hardy as the biggest babyface star in all of wrestling - all of whom had a major and different role to play in an alternative timeline not mapped by a bunch of past-it, self-serving f*ckwits.
The company itself was considered a desperate joke. The company was considered a desperate joke because:
Hardy returned, unadvertised, not as a main event star, but in an X-Division segment. An opening segment designed expressly to compete with WWE RAW as the opening shot of the New Monday Night Wars. An opening segment designed expressly to compete with WWE RAW that drew loud "This is bullsh*t" chants because the audience couldn't see what was actually happening. Also, Homicide got stuck up the cage.
The Nasty Boys turned up because they were Hulk Hogan's mates. A lot of things happened because Hogan held sway. Virtually everything that happened happened because Hogan held sway, including the role of Bubba The Love Sponge as interviewer.
No matter how irrelevant or unpopular, any act formerly of WWE was deified because they once appeared on WWE programming. The former Val Venis, Sean Morley, went over the beloved Christopher Daniels. AJ Styles dressed up as Ric Flair. The Nasty Boys turned up. Honestly, and this isn't snark, it's a directly analogy, to make this sort of mistake, AEW would have to draft in Adam Rose and put him over Hangman Page.
We don't think that's going to happen, but it actually did the last time a major corporation backed a wrestling promotion with a marketable roster.