Death of Wrestling: With A Whimper…

Greetings to all… It’s David Davis with my weekly blog: Death of Wrestling. For all of those who read this regularly, you will know that this is not a blog about bashing wrestling; it’s a blog of a frustrated fan, who loves the business and wishes that each week it could be a little better.

So… I don’t know how long ago now, a year or so, TNA started the Aces and Eights invasion storyline. I wrote quite a few blogs about how excited I was for it – I love an invasion storyline: NXT, WCW, Smackdown vs. Raw etc and the Aces and Eights was shaping up to be a good one… Sigh… bigger sigh…

Instead of all of the great possibilities we could have had: Jeff Jarrett taking back his company for instance, we were treated to a load of mid card jobbers from the WWE, and a load of mid card jobbers from TNA, thrown together to make a faction we were supposed to take seriously… Then they decided they needed some star power and added Mr Anderson, Devon and Taz… All of these people I had issues with for various reasons, but I have to admit they possessed the star quality the faction needed…

Finally, Bully Ray was added to the mix and from then on the whole storyline started to crumble for me… It’s inevitable in storylines like this; you get the excitement of the invasion, but that is followed by the lackluster notion of having to keep them around afterwards, and worse, find something to do with them. The WWE is having this problem with the Shield – being the bodyguards for the Authority is the opposite reason they came to the WWE in the first place: to right the injustice.

Aces and Eights were thrown a bit of a lifeline in the form of the Main Event Mafia. This is similar to what happened on Raw with the Shield and the Wyatt Family. What every great faction needs is a great faction to go to war with and the MEM gave Aces and Eights what they needed.

After months of watching them fight, backwards and forwards, I was excited to know how this feud would end, but boy was I disappointed. If you look up the phrase ‘with a whimper, not with a bang’ you’d be directed to last week’s TNA Impact where the MEM came out, delivered lackluster speeches and declared the job done. If they were really going to disband the group, surely it should have culminated in a match, or at least a proper implosion, or at the very least… some kind of story point…

Unfortunately, what we got was anything but good story – it was a series of pointless promos, delivered in an uninspiring way, by some of the greatest talents in this business who, quite frankly, can do better. It was made all the more pointless by using the reason that the Aces and Eights are no more, only to have Aces and Eights display quite clearly in the final segment of the show that they are just as ‘dominant’ as they’ve ever been.

It’s just another clear case of TNA living hand to mouth that will ultimately lead to its demise, if not the DoW. There’s a changing of the guard backstage as Hulk takes his ball back home to the WWE and shakes hands with Vince on a job well done: to systemically dismantle TNA from the inside out. BUT those left backstage at TNA shouldn’t make it so painfully obvious that they are reversing storyline decisions they didn’t agree with – In my opinion, what the fans want more than anything is consistency and, unfortunately, last week’s TNA showed anything but consistency…

That’s all folks… As always, post your comments, thoughts and opinions below! Or message me on twitter and let me know what you think the ‘Death of Wrestling’ is and I might just blog about it!!! Peace and I’m out…