One guy appreciated Flair’s presence: Sting reportedly complimented Flair in front of the whole company, referring to Flair as his mentor and saying that Flair was the sole reason he returned to TNA. Class move.
Two changes desired by the Hogan cartel reportedly got short-circuited by money mark Dixie Carter: For the time being, Vince Russo will remain in a creative capacity and Mike Tenay will continue on play-by-play. Hogan and his minions wanted to ax both. No idea what replacements were mooted.
Don’t judge Impact by the live crowd reaction. Those people get in free, and TNA is their home team. That was evident during Jarrett’s promo. Jarrett founded TNA. He’s their guy. Given chance, they’ll like him. Jarrett gave them a chance by soft-pedaling the heel aspect of his interview.
One of the sad things about Fonzie and Chachi returning to uh, big-time wrestling Monday is that they’ve lost all sense of irony. They yelled about the band being back together, forgetting that the cool thing about lines like that back in the late ‘90s was their intentionally outdated nature, the faux hipness created by referencing a movie that came out in 1980. Now that movie is 30 years old, and re-referencing it is a parody of a parody, about as sharp as a Xerox of a Xerox. Hall and Waltman did the impossible; they made DX look up-to-date. Triple H and HBK are still lame middle-aged rebels; just less lame than the reformed nWo.
But Nash is still good. He dresses his age, acts his age and doesn’t go to ridiculous lengths to hide his age but he’s cool. Nash doesn’t look like he’s 30 and wrestle like he’s 20, etc., but I knew YRG would pay off.
More to come. I’m going to watch Impact a third time. I bet it still blows. The 1.5 rating is impressive. TNA should be happy. But we’ll see where it leads. Monday’s Impact reminded me of the first WWE-administrated ECW reunion, or even those goofy Hardcore Homecoming house shows. The old names and faces drew interest initially. But after that, in the toilet.
Mark Madden can be reached at wzmarkmadden@hotmail.com.
