The Rant Of The Week: Fire Jarrett

Greetings conversationalists all across the fruited plain it is I your personal Harvester of Sorrow the one and only Phantom Lord and this is the ever important and all mighty Rant Of The Week. No one can ever accuse me of not having a sense of self worth and high value. As always I am coming to you from my bunker in the urban slum that is Brooklyn, New York and it’s been an interesting week to say the least. TNA finds new ways to agitate the hell out of me and pretty much all of their viewing audience (well at least those of us who don’t buy into Jarrett’s bullshit) I have a lot to get to this week.
First off the bat was the WWE doing some mid summer cleaning as they released a bunch of people. Some you saw coming…others you were shocked by.
The people who got “Future Endeavored” include
Stevie Richards
The Highlanders (Robbie & Rory)
Colin Delaney
Cherry
Referee Wes Anderson
Last week they also released the following people
Braden Walker (Chris Harris)
Nunzio (Little Guido)
James Curtis
Shannon Moore
Domino (OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH)
And Big Daddy V (Mabel/Viscera)
On youtube there is a hilarious “Best of Braden Walker” dvd trailer. It’s a shame about Chris Harris, but many figure it was his own fault. You finally make it to the WWE and you show up in the worst possible shape. As we know the WWE are not fond of anyone with beer guts. I remember reading years ago about how Gangrel’s push was killed dead simply because his shirt rose up showing his gut on a ppv. But even with that in mind, it wasn’t all Harris’s fault. First off they named him Braden Walker.
Is there anyone in the world named Braden? It’s like naming a boy Sue.
The ones that really shocked me were the releases of Stevie Richards and Cherry. Stevie has come back from so much and he can be the perfect sympathetic good guy. ECW is desperate for anyone with any kind of name to them and they go and release a guy who has been there since the start. How Tommy Dreamer has managed to dodge the bullet for so long is amazing if Stevie and Little Guido got canned.
I suppose Stevie will have a good run on the Indies should he choose to. As it is, there are people clamoring for him to go to Ring of Honor. There was also a mention on the DVDVR board about a hope and dream of the BWO reuniting for the CHIKARA Trios tournament next year. There’s also a petition going around that someone created in the hopes of getting TNA to sign Stevie. Normally I am against TNA bringing in WWE cast offs, but that’s only if they have nothing to offer (Kip James comes to mind). I think if TNA did sign Stevie it would be great because he deserves a chance to shine.
Of course the most natural hope would be a reunion between Raven and Stevie. I don’t know where that could happen, but it would be fun to watch if it did.

As for Cherry, I think I am in mourning. Ok well I’m not taking it that badly but still it annoys the hell out of me when they let go of someone who is unique and not shall we say from a certain mold. Cherry had a pretty unique gimmick along with Deuce and Domino down in OVW, but when they got called up it was extremely watered down. All of her that really was left unchanged was her being timid and scared at times. She never spoke for over a year and finally when they decided to turn her face and it just was the most retarded angle to say the least. Cherry’s “brother” and “boyfriend” dump her for one of the above mentioned bottle blondes (though I actually like Maryse…it took them 2 years to do something with her). I mean it made no sense though but as we know a lot of things in the WWE make no sense and this one was dropped pretty quickly and Deuce and Domino ended up breaking up and they ultimately got sent to different shows (though Domino just got canned as mentioned above).
Apparently now Cherry is taking bookings under the name of Cherry Pie. God bless her and I hope she has a ton of success doing that.
But as for the WWE…damn you…DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL.
Right now I’m finding it really hard to continue doing this column at least at the level I’ve been doing it at for the last six years or so (God I feel old). Between the column on LOP and the ones on this fine website I must have over 150 columns buried in my archive. I figure if I wanted to go all Scott Keith I’d have enough for maybe two or three books. But between the WWE and TNA my passion for wanting to watch wrestling is dwindling with each passing week. Yes there is still some great stuff like Glammerella on RAW and Vladimir Kozlov on Smackdown. There is enough to keep my attention so it’s not all bad. But over all it’s like I really don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this is what we see is the best they have to offer.
For now I will continue to slug away because someone has to be a voice for the common fan.
I have been planning on doing a huge piece on TNA because lets face it, there are a million things wrong with TNA and I could do a column on every single last one of them. I’ve been watching TNA from their start and they had so much promise to fill the void left by WCW and ECW. What they have managed to do in those six years sense is cause nothing but fans to wonder if TNA ever plans on really becoming a success. There is a huge core of fans out there that WWE does not have and TNA really has no excuse not to be going after them. All TNA is doing is just trying to cipher off fans from the WWE and as we’ve seen according to the ratings and buyrates it’s not working.
TNA is run by Jeff Jarrett and basically he is trying to recreate WCW from the year 2000. The big angle they are building is basically going to be New Blood vs. Millionaires club. Now normally an angle like this would work, but not the way they are building it up. Basically what it’s really building to is a match between Jeff Jarrett and Sting. Nothing to get over anyone involved, it’s just a way for Jarrett to fluff his ego and his own sense of self worth. I’ve always said TNA’s biggest problem is they booking their shows like they are still a company in Nashville. Jarrett’s superman act might have worked for Jerry Lawler in Memphis in the 80’s, but for 2008 it just sad to watch (which by the way I am convinced that’s all his doing…emulating Lawler).
It’s not that I hate Jeff Jarrett the wrestler. As a wrestler he’s pretty damn good and more then capable of putting on good matches. His only problem is he has this delusion that he and he alone is TNA’s top draw and EVERYTHING has to revolve around him. For the last couple of years since I really started taking TNA to task I’ve raised this point over and over and over and after this week I think I’ve finally reached my breaking point with TNA.
The basis of the current old vs. new angle in TNA is that Sting’s bat has been used to attack Samoa Joe and A.J. Styles. Also at the last PPV, Sting returned and he laid out AJ on the ramp after his match with Kurt Angle. Sting finally broke his silence on Impact and he gave a some what rambling (perhaps if it were 15 or 20 years ago a coke fueled) promo about why he did what he did. Basically the younger generation of stars can not be trusted with taking the company into the future because they have no respect for those who came before them.
Ok that right there is good enough for an angle. Through out the history of wrestling the most heated angles have always been between the legend who demands respect and the upstart youngster who wants to put said legend out to pasture. The greatest one was Bruno Samartino vs. Larry Zybysko which ended with a huge steel cage match in Shea Stadium in front of over 30,000 people where Bruno kicked the shit out of the youngster and beat the respect into him.
TNA could easily do this with say Sting and AJ Styles since that’s where they are obviously building to. The one problem is with Vince Russo molding this angle it will make no sense as all ready evident by Sting’s rambling promo. See Russo has always wanted things to be like a shoot. Up is down…left is right…black is white. Everything is gray so to speak. It can’t simply be a heel taking on a face. There has to be something else to it and as we know that just confuses the hell out of everything. Nothing can ever be simple when Russo is involved.
As much hate as we rightfully give Vince Russo, in the end he is only a messenger. Jeff Jarrett is the one putting all of this stuff together. Russo just has the unfortunate task of turning it all into a two hour show each week. But together they are a lethal combination and add into that Dutch Mantel and Jarrett’s other lackeys and toadies and its no wonder at its best Impact is confusing and at its worst it’s a train wreck.
Now as many of you know, I am a fan of Kevin Nash. I don’t care what people say I’ll take a Nash match over many others. I found this news blurb somewhat funny because it essentially proves my point about TNA’s booking.
Kevin Nash has once again butted heads with the creative team at the iMPACT! tapings this week. Nash was upset about the outcome of his match with Kurt Angle and was displeased with some of the backstage segments. He eventually agreed to lose the match. His ego has started to lose respect from within the company. “He needs to go,” said one TNA office worker. “It’s getting out of hand.”
Credit to ProWrestling.net
There was also a great interview with Nash in The Baltimore Sun by Kevin Eck where Nash talked about why he walked out of the Impact tapings a couple of weeks ago. This puts the above news blurb into perspective.
Nash also addressed reports that he walked out on the TNA Impact tapings last month in Orlando giving some more insight as to what went down. Here is what Nash had to say:
“I have a clause in my contract that states that when it comes to physicality, that I have the right to veto with creative anything that I don’t feel is safe, that is warranted or anything else. We had 10 guys and a battle royal is a cluster anyway. To give everyone a weapon and give me a pipe and then the only way I can be eliminated is to go over the top rope. As I was sitting and thinking about it, well the first thing I have to do is go over the top rope and make sure the pipe doesn’t leave my hand and hit a fan. Then I have to make sure that I don’t impale myself on it. And thirdly, I have to make sure I don’t land on it.
And then I found out I was being eliminated during a commercial break. So I said how about this. Since I have been around the business a long time the only time you eliminated someone during a commercial break is because of time problems or time constraints. I said if you take two of us out and make it an eight man, everybody can be eliminated on TV and I can eliminate myself before the match and we won’t have any problems because it wasn’t in the storyline. To me the storyline would be that Joe and I would go back and back, clean house, I would step over and shake his hand and Joe would win. That would have furthered the storyline in my estimation…if I was booking.
But it didn’t end that way and I talked to Jeff. Jeff said we wanted to have as many names as we could; we were trying to get you out early to protect you because we were bringing in guys with weapons. I understood this point and said, there was a pre-tape I was supposed to do later on that day so I said Jeff, do you want me to do the pre-tape? Jeff said no man that was cool and I said do you mind if I go home? He said no man, we shook hands and I left. Halfway on the way home my phone blew up with all these texts that said “get back here” and I said, no (smiling), I am on the other side of Orlando and I am not going all the way back. I am not swimming back up stream. My boots were in the trunk and I am done.
I find it funny that if this is true that people with in the TNA office are saying Nash has an ego. Well no shit he has an ego. He was only part of the biggest drawing group in the history of wrestling. If I were part of the N.W.O I’d have a huge ego as well and it would be well deserved. To Nash’s credit unlike others in his position he seems willing to want to put over the next generation of stars. For the most part the slow build between Joe and Nash has been one of the few things TNA has more or less done right (even if they always make Joe look like a whiney little bitch). So when TNA did this clusteruck of a weapons battle royal a couple weeks ago, Nash’s idea made perfect sense considering the nature of the match which made none what so ever.
I think when it comes down to it; Jarrett hates it when anyone tells him his booking is crap. It’s been documented all ready that Jarrett tells people to go take a walk if they confront him on the illogical nature of the layout of the show. Yeah the Nash walkout was blown out of proportion, but I guarantee only Kevin Nash could get away with doing this because if it were anyone else they would be jobbed out as we speak.
Now as for this match, it ended with Kurt Angle nearly being decapitated and bleeding to death (ok well it wasn’t that bad, but it sure was scary to watch) and it seems TNA would rather just gimmick everything then try to just put together a decent wrestling show.
After seeing the last month or so of matches Kurt Angle has been in, I’ve come to the conclusion that TNA wants Kurt Angle to die in the ring. The guy has a neck that is held together by chicken wire and screws. How he’s not a human pez dispenser I don’t know. But what I do know is they’ve had him in these weapons matches, then a last man standing match, an Olympic style match (that ended with him taking a guitar shot and being split open again) and finally another ladder match which ended with another guitar shot. Why they keep putting a guy who is so injury prone into matches like this is beyond me. Why they even have these matches to begin with is also another question I just can’t figure out.
TNA has such a great roster and there really is no need for all the bullshit they do. People keep wondering what can be done to fix TNA. Some people have this crazy notion that if TNA hired Paul Heyman he could stop the bleeding and fix everything. Well Paul is smart enough to not get onto a sinking ship. As long as Jeff Jarrett is in charge of things it does not matter WHO is writing the shows. Ultimately as the writer you are at the behest of the producer and since Jarrett is in charge what he says goes.
If you want change that’s all you have to do. Remove Jarrett from a position of power with in the company. Then and only then will TNA maybe have a chance to start over fresh. Bare in mind though, just because I think Jarrett should be removed from power doesn’t mean I think they should get rid of him as a wrestler. Like I said I like Jeff Jarrett the wrestler. Of course if he can’t put himself over he’d probably quit anyway. But with Jarrett making his grand return since he is a pillar of the wrestling business and the savior of TNA(watch the video they did on Jarrett on this weeks Impact if you don’t believe me) don’t expect that to happen any time soon. All I know is I’m just counting down the days till Jarrett/Joe is announced and Jeff takes the TNA title once again because as we know the first 780 days of his title reigns were such huge successes for them.
Before I do go, I want to know why in the hell is Kip James still employed by TNA. What redeeming value do they possibly see in him? They have him as a fifth wheel for The Beautiful People as their new stylist (well we all know Billy has no problem with the feminine touch). But seeing him come out of the tunnel in his Shawn Michaels banana hammock shorts and cut off tee tied around the naval I couldn’t help but think Billy missed out on the Gay Pride parade in the Village here in New York so he was making up for it. No offense to any gay or lesbian readers out there, but who in their right mind backstage at TNA sees a 43 year old man looking like this and says he looks perfectly fine for television.
Of course it could be worse. He could still be wearing Torrie Wilson’s old tights. But hey remember kids, he’s a MEGASTAR because ten years ago he happened to get lucky and was able to ride off the coat tails of others.
On that note I am done for this week. It took me longer then I expected to put this column together, but with TNA it’s not like they are exactly the most inspiring subject matter.
I also would like to send out my condolences to the family of Walter “Killer” Kowalski. Killer Kowalski passed away yesterday at the age of 81 after a lengthy hospital stay that included a massive heart attack a couple weeks ago. All I can say is I hope he is in a better place and part of that great wrestling event in the sky.
Until next time take care and remember someone has to give you this information and it DAMN well has got to be me.
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