9 Exact Moments TNA Booking Stopped Making Sense
7. Desmond Wolfe Wins The Fan Vote & Loses His Push
In their position as a "challenger" brand, TNA were at a bare minimum the company that could experiment with odd ideas and concepts on the off chance that one or two worked. This same mindset helped craft the at-times futuristic Ultimate X match, the actually-of-its-time X Division, and Joe Hendry becoming a massive star via the vehicle of coming out of cupboards and fridges.
A viewer-voted top ten was another one, that felt particularly useful early into the alienating Hulk Hogan/Eric Bischoff regime. Offering the potential promise of a push (or at very least a title shot and the push that could spring forth from that) to somebody the fans actively asked for wasn't just a nice bit of focus group work, but also something stood in direct contrast to a Vince McMahon-led WWE that stubbornly stuck to the whims of management over fan service...
...which they then abandoned by ignoring the result of the vote.
Desmond Wolfe (the rechristened Nigel McGuinness) was victorious in the poll over names such as Jeff Hardy, Kurt Angle and Abyss but lost in his one shot against Van Dam set to the grim backdrop of TNA moving back to Thursdays after a Monday Night "war" ratings humbling from WWE. The setting mattered - the initial shot had supposedly been for a pay-per-view spot, but Wolfe's victory resulted in the shunting it to TV instead. Then, that was that - yet another rejection of something audiences might have wanted from those in charged revealed TNA, once again, to be singing far too much from the market leader's hymn sheet than their own.