Can You See the Real TNA, Doctor?

One of the more disconcerting things about the opening segment of Impact this past Thursday - and believe you me, in a segment that terrible, this is saying a lot - was the standoff between Fortune and Hulk Hogan's TNA Freedom Fighters. During said standoff, you had Hogan, perhaps the most iconic WWF/E wrestler of all-time, touting a stable consisting of Jeff Hardy, Kurt Angle, Ken "Mr. Kennedy" Anderson and Pope D'Angelo "Elijah Burke" Dinero as the "real TNA" over Fortune, whose members included no fewer than four guys (AJ Styles, Beer Money and Douglas Williams, btw... Matt Morgan and Kazarian both had runs in the WWE) who have no more than a series of WWE dark matches under their belts at the very most.

Let that sink in for a second. A group of four guys, three of whom made their names in the WWE, are "the real TNA" over a group of six guys, four of whom having no WWE live camera experience whatsoever and could truly be considered TNA homegrowns. If that doesn't strike you as ass-backwards, then you're probably like Commenter Chunk or the mongoloid TNA fanboy at the Camel Clutch Blog who blasted me for daring to criticizing TNA and not fawning over it. Why a company is seemingly hell-bent on not creating their own stars and their own identity is beyond me, but with TNA, you can't be surprised at the depths of their stupidity. Then again, maybe they do have a point, even if that point is one that they shouldn't be making.

If you think about it, TNA has tried and tried again to recreate lightning in a bottle with old stars from the WWE, WCW or ECW at the expense of the guys who had real potential to become breakout stars. Even as far back as Monty Brown, TNA has never known the true potential of guys that were in front of them, or if they did, they let forces within the company stifle those lights and make sure the established dogs were kept on top. The closest they ever came to breaking out was when Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels and Styles main eventing a PPV with an X-Division Title match, and then Joe going on to win the World Championship. That was stifled, however, once TNA signed Angle and had him run roughshod over Joe in the main event.

Now, I'm not one of those people who is going to militantly state that WWE retreads should be coming in and just laying down en masse for TNA originals. You don't make money that way at all. There's no value in bringing in Kurt Angle or Jeff Hardy if all they're going to do is lose, especially if the fans want to see them win. However, you need to be smart in how you book them, and you need to be able to let your homegrown stars stand with those WWE-made wrestlers, not have them always be on a tier below.

Then again, good booking isn't synonymous with TNA, let alone words like "nuanced" or "subtle". I mean, this is a company that is debuting a new tandem of wrestlers that rip off Snooki and The Situation from Jersey Shore and are calling them, are you ready?... The Shore. Brilliant. Still, it's not too much to ask that if you're a wrestling company, you look to build your own identity first and then look to supplement with free agents from the outside.

There's a reason why the Washington Redskins haven't won a Super Bowl in almost 20 years. Their model is to trade draft picks in order to sign expensive and possibly washed-up free agents that other teams developed. If they aren't an a propos comparison to TNA and why they haven't and without a change in attitude never will even compete with the WWE, then I don't know what is.

Photo Credit: TNAWrestling.com

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