The Impact Crater 05.10.07

It’s May 10, it’s Imapct, and we’re just a few days removed from TNA Sacrifice! I’m Ryan, and I’ve got your complete run-down of the go-home show, including an upset by Homicide, the debut of a new tag team, and Kurt Angle doing exactly what Kurt Angle does every week on Impact. With a lineup like that, how could you possibly go wrong?

Pretty easily, it turns out.

Quick & Dirty Results

Segment #1: Homicide def. Scott Steiner & D-Von Dudley in a three way dance
Segment #2: Christy Hemme’s “Mystery Team” jumps the New Age Outlaws
Segment #3: The Murder City Machine Guns def. Jay Lethal & Sonjay Dutt
Segment #4: AJ Styles, Chris Daniels, & James Storm def. Chris Harris, Samoa Joe, & Rhino

Angle Numero Uno: Main Event?

For the fourth week running, the build to the main event of Sacrifice has left me underwhelmed. That’s a particularly bad sign given that this is the final show before the pay per view. The main angle here was that Christian had managed to take his challengers Sting and Kurt Angle and manipulate them in to fighting against each other. In theory he’ll try to take advantage of this to win on Sunday. However, the problem is that this story just wasn’t given time to develop. I hate to sound like a broken record, but not setting this match up as a three way on the first Impact after Lockdown really bit the whole booking process in the ass. We could have had three weeks of this “master manipulator” story building and developing, but instead a potentially long-term angle has to be crammed in to roughly fifteen minutes of TV time just because the company had to take so long in order to establish what the main event would be. If they wanted four weeks of Angle and Sting fighting back and forth, they should have just gone with Angle and Sting in a singles match at the pay per view. Doing otherwise muddies the waters and leaves us with a feature attraction that feels like it was slapped together at the last minute.

And what did we have to close the show, kids? A KURT ANGLE PULL-APART BRAWL~! They have to be doing these just to amuse me now.

Angle Numero Dos: Free to Be . . . You and Me

If there’s one thing that has me excited about TNA, it’s the debut of the Bashams. Most people might think that statement is sarcastic, but it’s really not. I know that during their tenure in WWE they were not the most well-liked performers in the world. In fact, the majority of the people that I’ve talked to thought they were flat out boring. However, I feel that a lot of that had to do with WWE’s booking of them as opposed to the inherent talent of either man.

To know what I’m talking about, you have to look no further than their OVW work. Taking a look at that, you’ll learn that “The Machine” Doug Basham was a remarkable in-ring performer who never truly got an opportunity to showcase his skills in the hard-to-take-seriously WWE tag team division. Just pick up Wrestling Gold’s “Wrestling’s Future Stars” DVD and watch his match against Rob Conway to see what I’m talking about. (Yes, Conway is a damn good performer as well.) Meanwhile, the Damaja is a not too shabby in the squared circle either, and he’s got an odd charisma that really managed to click with the fans in Ohio Valley. I don’t see why it couldn’t translate to the Impact Zone. What these two men have now is an opportunity to actually be themselves, and it’s an opportunity that I hope they and TNA take seriously. Granted, in 2007 a tag team is not going to be allowed to be a major draw for a company, but these two could really liven up the midcard and provide us with a great feud against LAX when/if one of the two teams turns.

For now, though, they’re saddled with Christy Hemme and the New Age Outlaws. I don’t care much for Hemme, though tonight she came off well in “evil bitch” mode, whereas she was unbearable in her “peppy babyface” or “whiny feminist” modes. Ultimately I hope that she fades in to the background, because, believe it or not, the Bashams are two guys that don’t need a manager to talk for them. They can handle that end of the game just fine on their own if allowed to do so. As far as their opponents go, the Outlaws have definitely seen better days, but Road Dogg is a smart enough performer that he can still make things work in the ring when he’s motivated. The entire match on Sunday basically depends on whether he brings his a-game or not. I would assume that the Bashams are since they want to make a good first impression, and I think everybody’s aware that we can’t count on Billy Gunn for anything aside from a decent physique and a questionable haircut.

Oh yeah, who else completely forgot that Lance Hoyt was an NAO ally? I sure did.

Angle Numero Tres: Good Concept, Bad Timing

It seemed like the idea with your other Sacrifice angles was to just throw the participants in the ring and have them work matches against each other. I can live with that most weeks, but I’ve always been of the belief that the final show before the PPV should be a little bit more angle-heavy than everything else. Sure, having Homicide pin D-Von Dudley was nice and all, but it seems like far more people would pick up the show based on a great Konnan promo than would seeing a result that we’ve now seen 5,000. Plus, when it comes to the six man, you didn’t even really have the Rhino/Daniels or Joe/AJ plots furthered, you just had the rivals out there in a situation where they could potentially lay hands on each other. If that’s all you’re going to do, you may as well just scrap the six man and do a singles match that advances the story for a PPV match, using the extra time to build other stories. I’m yet again amazed that a company who whines and whines and whines about how they don’t have enough time blatantly misuses that which they do have.

And the Rest . . .

~ Yet again, I find little to no use for this segment of the column. Once more, I must stress that is a good thing, not a bad thing. The fewer mindless thirty second backstage skits that TNA does, the more time the major players get, and they’re the ones selling they pay per views, so they’re entitled to it.

~ Sonjay Dutt, heel. Yawn.

~ I’m really wondering who Bob Backlund is supposed to be entertaining. Honestly, it seems as though every appearance that he has made is based around some in-joke that 90% of pro wrestling fans just wouldn’t get. C’mon, TNA. You’ve gotten rid of the majority of your asinine skits. Drop this guy too. Please.

~ I may as well point this out for those of you who haven’t heard it yet: New Japan Pro Wrestling star Tiger Mask IV is headed to Sacrifice and will wrestle Alex Shelley, Jerry Lynn, and Low Ki in a four-way X Division match. On one hand, I’m in favor of this because it seems like the first X Division match in ages that hasn’t had the stench of Bob Backlund or Kevin Nash hanging around the ring. On the other hand, I don’t get the point of bringing in a guy like Tiger Mask, who could be a real treat for a small percentage of your fans, and burying him in a multi-man match. Instead of showing what he can really do against an American opponent that we may never see him against again, he’s most likely just going to hit a couple of spots, grab his check, and go home. On my blog this past week I talked about how TNA should refigure its pay structure to avoid situations like this, and I hope that somebody in the company figures that out sooner rather than later.

Overall

Sorry, TNA fans, but nothing has come of the march to Sacrifice. The show seems like a total filler PPV, with a main event that wasn’t even important enough to put together until halfway through the build and an undercard that only a mother (specifically Jay Lethal’s mother) could love. The best matches that they have on paper heading in to this show are Bobby Roode vs. Jeff Jarrett and the Bashams vs. The New Age Outlaws, and even those haven’t been promoted as effectively as possible. Bashams/Outlaws is being done with only three real days of build, as you can’t in good conscience count the period during which the battle went unannounced. Meanwhile, Jarrett/Roode was all but ignored on the last show before the PPV, despite the fact that it was the single hottest angle in the company for the last three weeks. With the build to the top matches being flat and the build to the matches that have the potential to be good being ignored, Sacrifice feels like nothing more than a filler show. Hopefully they turn things around going in to Slammiversary, and hopefully they avoid that inane King of the Mountain Match. Doing a five-man main event afer a three-man main event that came after a ten-man main event feels like overkill. Let’s just do a straight match for once, huh?

And, with Impact behind us, it’s reader feedback time!

411’s own Andy Critchell chimes in. He doesn’t appear to like this company much more than I do:

>”For the past several months, TNA’s pattern has consisted of putting on a really good show right after the PPV and then having their programs get progressively worse as the big show draws closer. That’s almost exactly the opposite of what you want to do, but that’s how they’ve been running the show. The pattern continued here, as everything feels like it’s grinding to a halt as opposed to gaining momentum.”

That’s what taping three shows in one night will get you. You are a better man than I for being able to sit though Impact week after week. I was watching it last night and thinking, “why am I watching this?” Thank God for the NBA.

The scary thing is that I think last week’s episode was actually the first shot in a two episode taping, not the third shot in a three episode taping.

And first-time writer Jeff O., wants to talk screwy finishes:

Hi there. Great recap of impact. But after watching it thursday night I thought something was done kind of stupid. They wondered who would get the title shot because of a doule-submission. But wouldn’t the legal man in the ring be the true contender? If the illegal guy gets the submission it shouldn’t count anyway. Thoughts?

Actually, if we’re going to strictly adhere to the rules of tag team wrestling, the referee shouldn’t have even checked Christian to see if there was a submission. He should have applied a five count to Angle and Sting since they were double teaming and then should have disqualified them if the illegal man didn’t get out of the ring. However, the legal man/illegal man distinction has been ignored so much by wrestling promotions (not just TNA) in recent years that I wasn’t going to bother taking them to task for that. They have much bigger problems, namely that they can’t book a storyline compelling enough to get more than 2% of their TV audience to buy their pay per views so that they can start making money.

With that, I close the mailbag for another week. If you missed it, I updated my MySpace blog earlier this week with more reader feedback, covering a few TNA-related issues that I hadn’t managed to hit in prior Craters as well as topics that related to non-TNA columns that I’ve written over the last couple of weeks. Speaking of non-TNA columns, I made a rare appearance in the 411 Movie/TV Zone this week, reviewing the second American Dad DVD set. Check that out if you’re bored . . . and I’ll see you again in seven days.