6 Most Insane Things Happening In Wrestling Right Now (July 7)
In which Global Farce Wrestling is also really good (!).
Is the wrestling landscape shifting?
New Japan Pro Wrestling marauded into America last weekend and generated significant buzz with, on the face of it, their two worst major shows of the year. Even with the handicap of a totally past-it, botchy Billy Gunn in a prominent position on the card, the league proved why it is the premier wrestling promotion on the planet.
Meanwhile, over in WWE, John Cena mispronounced Bulgaria as "Bulge-area" to initiate a rehash of his rivalry with Rusev on this week's SmackDown, which follows just two years and zero character development later. Titus O'Neil continues to hype his "Brand" to precisely zero audience reaction. The heat-less and repetitive Noam Dar/Cedric Alexander/Alicia Fox live triangle is still ongoing six months later. It's as if the company is Henry VIII, morbidly obese and eating itself into a stupor with no care for itself whatsoever. Henry in his twilight years was moved about with the help of mechanical inventions; WWE lurches from one show to the next abetted only by its world class roster.
Of all people, Roseanne Barr is getting in on the NJPW craze. Slowly, the company is penetrating the mainstream consciousness in parallel with WWE's fading popularity.
Even Global Force Wrestling shunted WWE from the conversation this week...
6. Jeff Jarrett Has Only Gone And Bloody Done It
News broke this week that Jeff Jarrett's Global Force Wrestling - not so much a wrestling organisation as an actual Ponzi scheme - has subsumed the Impact Wrestling brand and has become a promotion for the first time in its three year non-history.
A brief account of that non-history: Jeff Jarrett founded GFW in 2014. The aim was to create a coalition of wrestling leagues under one banner in order to maximise their individual resources and compete with WWE. It didn't work out.
Jarrett was exposed as a charlatan mere months into the venture when he embellished the success of the one good thing he did - bringing NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 9 into U.S. homes - by taking near sole credit for its creative success, with which he had nothing to do. The charlatan tag stuck when Jarrett posted a video encouraging viewers to watch another video advertising "Karatbars" - extortionate gold bars you have to extort suckers to make money back from in a pyramid recruitment programme, the likes of which are mostly illegal. Jarrett mustn't have experienced success with this, either; the ugly GFW belts were silver and green in colour.
Mere months after finalising a protracted transition from Total Nonstop Action to Impact Wrestling, Jeff Jarrett has somehow persuaded Anthem officials to go with the joke GFW branding in place of the Impact branding officials attempted for years to implement. To be fair, the options were "toxic" or "nonexistent", so in effect, the group is starting from scratch. Only, adding to the confusion, Impact Wrestling has been retained as the name of the promotion's TV show.
Really, it should have been abandoned altogether. It is almost profoundly ironic; the group was never more irrelevant than it was between the TNA and GFW eras.