The Rise & Fall Of TNA | Wrestling Timelines

TNA follows up its best ever night with one of the worst ever wrestling booking decisions. This promotion must be kept at arm’s length at all times. That’s the lesson taught here. Never invest. You will be punished for investing. TNA is shorthand for bad, late WCW-esque wrestling. TNA will only rid itself of that stigma by booking a coherent product over a very long period of time. Unhelpfully, the stupidity becomes a near-weekly occurrence. Let’s first resist an easy narrative. 

2006 was a good year in places. In particular, the hilariously irreverent Paparrazi Productions stable is a meta cult hit that treats the audience with intelligence - an eclipse-level rare development for U.S. pro wrestling. But the idea that TNA is on the cusp of something momentous without Russo at the helm is naive. TNA remains a very uneven product across 2005 and 2006 regardless of who holds the pen. 

Between Victory Road 2004 and May 2005, it’s Dusty Rhodes. After that, a committee is formed, which includes Scott D’Amore and Jeremy Borash. Rhodes does what the out-of-touch booker tends to do: regurgitate old ideas best left to the past because they simply aren’t up to speed on the wider world. In an infamous example, where Dusty drew on 1980s action cinema to create the Mad Max-inspired WarGames match in 1987, in 2005, he is influenced by the 1984 classic ‘The Terminator’ when creating the Trytan character played by Ryan Wilson. The gimmick is an antique, and the debut is shockingly nonsensical. If your knowledge of TNA is not exhaustive, you’d be forgiven for believing that Russo never left. In Trytan’s debut, he wrestles Monty Brown at Destination X. Brown is awarded the victory when he pins somebody who is not Trytan. The lights go out. Dennis ‘Mideon’ Knight, under a mask, takes Trytan’s place. In a series of events not too dissimilar to the events of Vince Russo’s infamous, reviled ‘New York Rules’ episode of WCW Thunder on May 3, 2000, Brown pins Knight and is awarded the win over Trytan. LOLTNA exists independently of Vince Russo, who is not responsible for the backwards decision to have Raven dethrone NWA World champion AJ Styles at Slammiversary on June 19, 2005. Still, with Russo back, things are about to get considerably worse. 

On the very next TV show after Bound For Glory, Russo books the first match in his new Fight For The Right tournament format: the Reverse Battle Royal. This feels like the literal extreme of Russo’s anti-wrestling approach. He seems to think that the very medium of wrestling is awful, so he attempts to produce its opposite here. What he doesn’t think through is the idea that a Reverse Battle Royal - in which the aim is to enter the ring as quickly as possible - should be a running race. This is drastically undermined when various wrestlers brawl at ringside for no reason. It is one of the worst wrestling moments ever, down there with the absolute dreck. 

This infamously terrible idea deepens the stigma of LOLTNA.