2012 Pro Wrestling Thread

Watched some of it . . . wasn't nearly as good as the week before.

 

The E has released a new CM Punk shirt. On the front ... "I dig crazy chicks." I'm so getting that one.

 

Watching it now, and there's plenty wrong with it. How they went from having a great tag division to throwing together two guys who should be world title contenders as a team to challenge for the titles is beyond me. Sting being in the title picture is a waste. The whole thing they're doing with giving wrestlers tryouts before the judging panel could be decent but they spend way too much time on it.

One thing I do kinda like is how they're setting up the TV title. Defended every week with the added mix of an online poll to determine the opponent. Kinda makes for an interesting twist.

 

I agree having the TV title defended every week is a good thing. TNA should put more of an emphasis on tag teams (like ROH does) so that it can show fans it's different from the WWE.

 

0.89 rating for the live Impact. When you're doing better taped than live, you've got problems. They can't use the Western Conference Finals as an excuse for long. As for solving the tag team issue: simply make a phone call to Chris Harris and reunite America's Most Wanted. I know they've invested a lot of time in making James Storm a face, but put those two back and give the division life again. Losing Alex Shelley hurts, but move on.

As for the Knockouts, I guess we'll see just how much of an impact (no pun) intended Brooke Hogan will have on Thursday. My guess is that all roads will lead to her eventually getting into the ring.

 

Yeah, it's not good when you've been building to something for a month and suddenly you have lower ratings.

 

That's the problem with the wrestling industry. Nobody these days is willing to stick with something long enough to see if it will actually work. If something doesn't shoot through the roof in the first few weeks, they drop it and move on. There's no patience and build at all. Just aggravating.

 

THis is true.

I don't remember who it was (I think Flair, but I may be wrong), but they had said that a wrestler used to be graded on their body of work, but during the Monday Night Wars, they started getting graded on their last quarter-hour, which was very intense. The wrestlers felt a lot of pressure because of it.

Take Tensai, for example. He goes from a dominant debut, to getting a win over to Cena, to being off TV, all in a few weeks. Because of a shitty gimmick that, odds are, the writers gave him.

If it were me, instead of pretending the fans don't have a clue it's Albert with a shaved back and some face paint, I would have done something to, like Lesnar, give Albert/Tensai some legitimacy.

I would have had him come out, attack Cena with Laurinatis watching, then the next week, have Ace come out, cut a promo about how, just like himself, Albert was great in Japan and he brought him back. Show highlights of Albert in WWE, then show him kicking ass in Japan on the Titantron. Then have Albert come out, tell the world that he was given the honor of a new name, Tensai, by the fans for his ass-kicking ways. Then have him destroy a few guys Japanese-style (minus the karate kicks.)

 

I thought the problem with pro wrestling is that they try to shove concepts down the fans' throats even when they aren't working? Seems like the opposite of the problem you guys are describing.

 

Well, the issue here is that Tensai was 1) such an overwhelming failure that the WWE couldn't paper over him and 2) probably didn't have anyone in the back willing to fight for him, because he was new. In contrast, if you're one of the first big hires of Triple H and one of your few chances at selling big in Mexico (Sin Cara), or the spawn of a wrestler or wrestling family (Ted Jr., Vickie Guerrero, hundreds of others) then you'll get plenty of rope, regardless of whether you're getting real heat or X-Pac heat.

All that being said, the WWE is cutting bait too quick with Tensai if they don't at least try having him get pissed off at / address all of the Albert chants. You don't really have much to lose at this point, so why not?

 

As a couple of others above have mentioned, what would it have hurt WWE if they had come out of the box and admitted that Tensai was indeed the former wrestler named Albert? Right off the bat, they screwed themselves, more so when the fans were cheering "Albert" and Cole/Lawler did nothing to acknowledge it. Had they done that, perhaps the push goes further. I do think, however, that with Linda McMahon again running for office, WWE is going to paint by numbers in so much they won't get too creative between now and Election Day. How that ties to Tensai? Simple: they're going to be more fucking lazy with storylines and more unwilling to roll the dice. If they're hitting 2.7 on a two-hour show in May, what's going to happen come fall when the NFL is wiping them out over three hours?

It's that thought which makes Impact's one-hopper to the mound last Thursday more disappointing. The window is open, but they seem unwilling to go through it.

 

I kind of understand why they didn't want to embrace him as Albert/A-Train, because for the most part he was mid-card and generally irrelevant. There was a little revival when he was the last member of Team Heyman in the Survivor Series that one year, attacking John Cena (who had turned down the offer to be on his team) and cementing his face turn. But as a whole, nobody's biting at the chomp to watch a non-main event guy they haven't seen in a WWE ring in many years. Sean Morley could go to ROH, hold the World title in a series of five-star matches and then come back to WWE, but the response would be either "who is this dude?" or "MAKE A JOKE ABOUT YOUR PENIS".

You can do the Brody/Gordy/Hansen/Steve Williams buildup, where Albert dismisses his WWE past and gives us a nickel tour of his Japanese dominance. But replace Japan with MMA, and you're basically doing the Lesnar buildup. If you're doing two leaves of the same branch, it undercuts them both.

If they really wanted to create a new, non-Albert character, they should have masked him. The smart fans would still know it was Albert, but it wouldn't be quite as obvious.

As for TNA: The idea that they shouldn't have abandoned Monday night so quickly would be OK were it not for the massive ratings drop it experienced there. I think the only show in the live run that went above 1.0 was the first show, when RVD debuted. After that, it was under 1, as low as like .52. I don't think they ever would have gotten back to 1.0 if they stayed in that slot, and it might have been enough to kill them off. So for all the fuckups TNA has made lo these many years, cutting bait on live Monday as quickly as they did is not one of them.

TNA's .89 isn't *that* big a deal, in that shows always fall off when you move their timeslot. How they train their viewers to accept an 8 p.m. start in the next couple of months that'll tell the tale. If it doesn't work out, they've been selling this as a summer special, so they could go back to taped at 9 p.m. come Fall.

I don't think there's much TNA can do at this rate. There's a finite audience for wrestling that is much smaller than it was during the Monday Night Wars era. The three national cable TV shows available today get a combined rating of roughly 6.0 (3.0 Raw, 2.0 Smackdown, 1.0 Impact). Raw at its peak was well above 6.0 every week on their own, and even though WCW was getting drilled, it was still getting in the 2s and low 3s. TNA has hired a bunch of prominent names in the last few years, including Angle and Jeff Hardy when they were still top-card players in WWE, and that's not enough to move the needle but so much.

That's why, no matter how we fantasy book Tensai, it wouldn't have much impact in the grand scheme. If Lesnar couldn't produce a bump, what hope does Albert have?