Hey TNA, remember when, out of nowhere, Chris Sabin won the TNA Heavyweight Title? How about the time that James Storm held it for about a week? Who could forget Austin Aries three month run with the gold? Well, now, Eric Young, the former leader of the awful World Elite stable, a lackey in Team Canada, the man who was briefly cast as "Super Eric", a man who was out of his league when paired together with Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, and was one half of the Knockout's Champions, is now your TNA Heavyweight Champion. Is it because if you were standing 100 feet away from him, you might kind of, sort of, think he looked like Daniel Bryan who just won WWE's World Title? What was TNA creative thinking? Giving the title to new people now and then is a good idea for a wrestling company. It's what keeps the wrestling world moving forward. Giving the belt to people who are not main-event talent, with no compelling storylines to back the title change is a really, really bad idea. I have no problem with Eric Young, I think he's a good, fun loving wrestler. But you can't just go from him being a complete goofball, to getting tossed around by Abyss, to losing to Samoa Joe in five minutes to becoming the champion of the company. It was a story that basically had a first chapter (Eric Young is zany) and then a final chapter (Eric Young wins the World Title) there was about 35 missing chapters in there somewhere. TNA didn't bother to write those. They just gave us the pay-off when it wasn't deserved. Magnus may be the one who suffered most. He had a title reign where he failed to beat his opponents cleanly, was bigfooted by Dixie Carter most of the time, was stuck with comedy sidekicks, and then lost to a comedy act. But his biggest problem, and the reason he most likely doesn't have the Heavyweight Title anymore is because he doesn't look like Daniel Bryan...unless you looked at him from a couple of miles away.
As Rust Cohle from True Detective said "Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you're good at."
Sadly, I can't solve a murder like Rust...or change a tire, or even tie a tie. But I do know all the lyrics to Hulk Hogan's "Real American" theme song and can easily name every Natural Born Thriller from the dying days of WCW. I was once ranked 21st in the United States in Tetris...on the Playstation 3 version...for about a week.
Follow along @AndrewSoucek and check out my podcast at wrestlingwithfriends.com
