TNA's X-Division
About a year and a half ago, an old buddy of mine wrote an excellent editorial on How NWA-TNA Could Compete With WWE.
18 months later, and I still see some problems after last night's edition of TNA Impact! on Spike TV.
The primary offender in last night's program was the presence of Bob Backlund. Look, I understand that the man was a legend long ago in wrestling, but that was in WWE (the rival company) anyways, not to mention that today's fans (particularly TNA) are from a different generation.
For the past month or more, TNA has had this man walk into the background of various backstage skits, maybe say a word or two, but have some kind of retarded mystery about him. Last week, when another old-timer (Jerry Lynn) won a match, Bob Backlund came out and seemingly united with him. The backstory is that Backlund wants to align himself with the man he thinks can take the X-Division title from current champion, Chris Sabin. So, it made wrestling-type sense that an old man would align with an old man, despite the logic behind backing a 42-year old man against someone in his prime.
Getting back to last night's episode, however... The night featured a six-man tag team match (3 vs 3) featuring X-Division wrestlers Jay Lethal, Senshi, Jerry Lynn, Aries Starr, Alex Shelley, and Chris Sabin. The match was awesome. The crowd was even chanting "this is awesome" during the match. That is because the crowd cannot hear the announcers at a live event so their focus is on the match. To the millions of viewers at home, however, the announcers are the soundtrack of the whole show, feeding you with information on a play-by-play basis of what is happening in the ring, promoting the good guys and admonishing the bad guys (so the fans know who to cheer for and who to boo), and overall selling the story and upcoming pay-per-view climax of the feuds between wrestlers. Hell, that's why TNA actually recruited former Home Shopping Network salesman Don West to be one half of the announce team.
During last night's six-man tag team match, Backlund came out and joined the announcers. He proceeded to act crazy. I mean insane. He talked down to the announcers and hijacked the broadcast, talking nonsense throughout the match, as Don West and his partner Mike Tenay tried to calm him down. Every now and then they might mention the action in the ring (their job), but Backlund would just rattle off more babble and the direction would focus back on him.
TNA did a great disservice last night to the six men in the ring who put on a fantastic show and who received minimal attention during their performance.
TNA (not unlike WWE) has a habit of having old wrestlers around for a nostalgia factor and most likely in hopes of drawing in old wrestling fans to TNA. But the product is so different than the era of these wrestlers that it does not equate.
This brings me to another old wrestler who is also intertwined with the X-Division.
Look, the X-Division is TNA's claim to fame. The wrestlers who are part of this division are high-flying acrobatic artists in the ring that get the kind of crowd reactions such as "this is awesome." WWE doesn't have this. Their closest substitute is Rey Mysterio, whose every match is predictable (you know it isn't over until he goes for his 619 signature move). As stated in my buddy Bill's Blog, TNA should really make the X-Division their main highlight - and they often do give it a lot of attention, but lower in the card (earlier in the night) than other events, as well as horrible mismanagement of the stars (see above).
For the past several weeks, the X-Division wrestlers have for some reason been involved in backstage skits with the most useless wrestler in the past 5 years, Kevin Nash. You need only click the link to read of his antics in TNA, as well as his previous time in WWE before joining TNA. This man's main draw is a revolutionary storyline that began over 10 years ago and has since become a memory. But management - in both companies, to be fair - think that this man will draw in fans. All he has done in the past six months or so is act as an actor in backstage skits that do nothing to further the characters involved or any feuds they are involved in.
Backstage skits halt the action, and for a company called Total Nonstop Action, they should be used sparingly. It makes sense to have a backstage interview that leads to a promo for a match or feud, but general skits featuring an excellent wrestler like Jay Lethal doing impressions of Macho Man Randy Savage do nothing but take away time from that wrestler's in-ring time; his only time on TV that week shows him as a joker, not as an athlete.
Even before Kevin Nash got involved in making the X-Division look stupid, management had Jay Lethal, Sonjay Dutt, and Chris Sabin not taking their wrestling matches seriously, and instead preferring to watch clips of Jackass 2 backstage up until their match. While this was obviously a case of promoting a sponsor, it ended up showing that each man was more concerned with hijinks and humor than actually wrestling, which is what the fans pay to see.
TNA has a really good program going, but the problem is that, with only an hour a week to get over wrestlers and feuds, they are mishandling the execution of such a task. Their main event situation has been handled well, what with talented wrestlers that have had experience in that light (save Scott Steiner, whose sucktitude is so bad it would warrant an entire separate editorial), but when their main draw is unique and exclusive original wrestlers that have never been with other companies, they need to put these people at the forefront of their booking and show the world and new viewers something new, something exciting, and something captivating.