The People’s Column: TNA’s Vacant Championship and Refusal to Push Talent

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Greetings everyone! I’m delighted to write for all of you this week. It’s been a long one for me with my Summerslam predictions (which were less than spectacular), going to the show, going to Raw the next evening and finally blogging like a mad man about it all. If you would like to view that blog it’s at itswilltime.wordpress.com. I’m currently writing about how The Nexus lost it’s heat and how to regain it and questioning wether Daniel Bryan would be better off if he was not fired.

On Thursday night it will come out that TNA’s World Heavyweight Champion will be vacating the title due to “injuries” sustained in an attack by Abyss last week (said attack was ridiculously cartoony, by the way). To replace him TNA will hold an eight man tournament that is being rumored to end at Bound for Glory in October. To analyze this decision, I would like to look at Rob Van Dam’s run as TNA champion.

After a lackluster debut that saw him do a lot of standing around with Jeff Hardy RVD was featured strongly on the episode of Impact where he was hot-shotted to the World Championship with victories over Hardy and AJ Styles. He put the belt over strongly as something he desired and his celebration was as close to a classic moment as TNA has produced. He was suddenly the central point of the promotion.

Fans were in love with this idea. RVD was a nice choice as champion. Although he was a former WWE wrestler, he was someone that was seen as never really getting his chance in that company. In TNA it looked as if they planned to let RVD be RVD. He talked a big game about how he was used to giving talent the best matches of their entire career and said that he planned to do so in all of his main events in TNA.

The company continued to build around Van Dam. He was pushed as the man who stood up for the values of TNA. When a babyface was in peril, RVD was there to save him. He was the main star of the promotion and someone who it looked like TNA planned to build around for a long period of time.

All of that work is now wasted. In wrestling, there is only one reason to build a star up and that is for them to lose to other stars and build them up. The business is very I treating in that regard. People are elevated so they can elevate others and that is how the business works. Rob Van Dam is breaking those rules. He ran out of dates with TNA and instead of losing the championship, he is forfeiting it. I will not say that thus is his fault, but rather that it is the incompetent booking that TNA is known for.

Who benefits from RVD forfeiting the championship? Does the person who wins the tournament? I do not believe they will. They will simply look like a paper champion who could not beat RVD, but could beat lesser men.

Speaking of the winner of the tournament, has TNA already told us who the winner will be? Kurt Angle, in his quest to conquer the Top 10 Rankings, has said that if he loses, he will retire. With this stipulation is there any other way for TNA to book this tournament. No one expects Angle to retire, so he must be the next TNA champion. What is the point of this tournament then? Is it just so Angle has to beat a few men on his way to the championship?

Instead of the Bound for Glory main event that looked like it was destined to be Angle vs RVD, we will get Angle vs someone else in a foregone conclusions match (a new Russo specialty). With no new talent getting over in this tournament and Angle leaving with the championship and a future match with RVD in his future, what is the point?

Many people have criticized WWE this week for their booking of The Nexus angle moving forward (something I discussed on my blog at itswilltime.wordpress.com), but at least they had eight men who had never even competed on pay per view in the main event of one of their biggest shows of the year. How long has TNA had the same talent at the top of their cards with no one new breaking through?

That’s all I have to say this week folks! Remember to check out itswilltime.wordpress.com for continuing coverage and thoughts about wrestling. Enjoy your weekend and I’ll be back Monday with 10 Thoughts on Raw (another show which I was at live).

Will is a 23 year old graduate student at UC Irvine. He is going to school for Stage Management and has always been passionate about pro wrestling. He began writing "The People's Column" in 2009. In 2010 he started his own wrestling blog, which is growing at an alarming rate. He is married to a beautiful woman (pictured on his profile) who accompanies him to most wrestling events that he goes to. Will is thankful for everyone who reads and interacts with him on Pulse and on his blog.