Rasslin'
A few notes on wrestling and other related topics.
*The wrestling business in the U.S. is about to get interesting again, for those of you who used to watch on Monday nights, even if you won't admit it now, and stopped watching once Vince McMahon swallowed the entire business. Since then, WWE has been behaving like most monopolies, forcing what it wants down the shrinking audience's throats rather than listening and adapting to what the audience wants.
This could very well change starting on Monday, October 3, when the WWE moves from Spike TV to the USA Network. Spike has been dominating Monday night ratings since getting WWE, and doesn't want to let go of first place.
So Spike is counterprogramming Raw with a live Ultimate Fighting special on the third; then will go with its Ultimate Fighter reality show on Mondays from there. They've also added the NWA Total Nonstop Action wrestling show after Ultimate Fighter.
NWA TNA has been around for a few years. TNA started off as an experiment in pay-per-view-only promotion, with weekly events. They scrapped that and went to monthly pay-per-views and a weekly show on Fox Spotts Net. Now they're on Spike, and going head-to-head basically because Spike wants to spite WWE.
TNA has a few wrestlers familiar to fans, like Raven, Jeff Jarrett, Kevin Nash, and Diamond Dallas Page. The Dudleys are going to debut soon.
Their best performers, though, are the guys you've probably never heard of. Wrestlers like A.J. Styles, Samoa Joe, and Christopher Daniels have been putting on some of the best matches in the country for small audiences the past couple years. (Joe gets Dave's World's endorsement as the best wrestling performer in the country right now, and that is not meant as a slight to the other two). With a national spotlight, even with a late time slot, these guys have the opportunity to make names for themselves the way Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero did a decade ago.
Vince McMahon is clearly taking this seriously -- he's loaded up his debut show on USA by basically bringing back every big star in the company's history short of Chief Jay Strongbow. But in the long term, if Vince wants to maintain his stranglehold on the business, he's going to need to adapt his product beyond the same soap-opera stuff that was fresh in 1998 and is stale now. A lot of the old wrestling audience have started watching UFC because they're getting the real thing with real grudges. That's going to be hard to match in a head-to-head setting. And TNA has the potential to put on better staged matches with a fraction of Vince's budget.
*Of course, neither WWE nor TNA are as good from top-to-bottom as CMLL wrestling from Mexico City. How hot is CMLL these days? According to the Wrestling Observer, CMLL is on pace to draw a million paid admissions in Mexico City alone this year. Its main weekly shows on Friday nights are drawing an average of 11,000 people to the 16,000-seat Arena Mexico. Their Sunday and Tuesday shows at 5,000-seat Arena Coliseo are averaging about 4,000. And that's just their shows in the capitol and not the rest of the circuit. (CMLL also owns both arenas and all their TV production equipment, so their profit margin must be staggering).
*Ah yes, Mistico. Haven't caught up with him in awhile. Last week, while watching him do this move where he runs across the ring, does a twisting dive over the top rope and out of the ring, grabs his opponent's arm while still in mid-air, then turns it into an arm drag as he hits the deck, I found myself thinking, boy, that looks pretty spectacular, but one of these days he's going to slightly mistime one of those and he's going to be toast. Well, I just read in the Observer that he did indeed miss one, and now will be on the sidelines awhile with a dislocated hip. Since the CMLL shows on Galavision air on a five-month delay, I'm going to pretend I never heard about Mistico's injury, then come on the blog acting all surprised one of these days when I see it on TV.
*I've been meaning for awhile to write a review on my colleagues Ed Symkus and Vin Carolan's Wrestle Radio USA: Grapplers Speak, and will eventually, but for now here's a quick plug for their book on Amazon.com
*Back tomorrow with a new Dispatches from Iraq piece.
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