Hi everyone, sorry I haven't been writing and contributing much, but I have been busy doing work inside the industry and haven't been home much as of late. Last night TNA Wrestling may have presented it's best PPV in years, and it was the first thing I have actually been able to watch and sit through on television in some time.
We all tend to follow crowds as human beings, and TNA has been considered a punch line to a long running joke within the industry, with infrequent bright spots being overshadowed by such large volumes of stupidity that most fans who are smart to the business had long since given up on the company. But there were five thousand people in that crowd last night, and they were mostly paying fans, and it could be very symbolic of a cyclical turn that happens from time to time within this business.
Now, I am not saying that TNA doesn't come without it's inherent flaws. We all have known for some time what they are, and if you actually follow this business as closely as I do, there have been subtle changes to the company that most people do not even take the time to notice. Eric Bischoff is now off of television. Don West no longer works for the company. If Flair is gone, it may be addition by subtraction (and he is not coming back as of this article). They are certainly doing everything they can to cater to their audience, and (unlike WWE) they do not call their product entertainment. It is simply called what it is always has been called, and that's professional wrestling.
For all of the people who are supposedly smart to this business, how many of you have actually tried to run a start up company in a market that is basically monopolized by a giant corporate organization? In my outside life, I was able to accomplish this in one town with a few friends of mine and it had nothing to do with wrestling at all (it was actually the specialty coffee industry). It is literally David vs. Goliath times a million, and while I was part of this company for six of its ten years in existence, it has now vanished from the marketplace, replaced by other people in the same town trying to duplicate what we actually accomplished.
If you purportedly love professional wrestling and are older than 35, you may (like me) have memories of this industry when it was still about the territories. I used to love watching wrestling when I was a kid, but it was so different then. WWF was running the show for sure, but I also was able to watch World Class Championship Wrestling on ESPN, the NWA on WTBS and so many more organizations through the power of cable television that I never was a big fan of Vince McMahon's vision for the future.
When WCW was purchased for the paltry sum of approximately three million dollars, I remember my older brother Jim and I having a conversation about the end of the greatest era of all time that we had personally witnessed from beginning to end. Now, my nephew Jack has become a fan, and I can only hope that companies like TNA, ROH, The Shane Douglas/Five Guys promotion and the myriad of others I cannot spend time on mentioning continue to thrive in this industry. If you honestly look at the current WWE product with any objectivity, you will notice that it is eerily similar to the early 1990's run that was campy at its best and made anything since look great in comparison.
I wonder if Vince McMahon himself looks back and wonders if he did the right thing by buying up all of those companies in the 1980's? I am certain that if he had to do it all over again he would publicly state that he would, but economics and numbers do not lie, and we have lost millions of fans since WCW went under, and they have to be out there somewhere. Last night's PPV showed that people do indeed want an alternative. I just hope that there is someone out there with enough money to eventually make this a competition again, because WWF/E has always been lacking without healthy competition.
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