Eric Young is a case study of TNA's biggest flaw

[HMARK Center]

It dawned on me during the main event of the PPV tonight what TNA's single biggest problem is, and it hit me really hard that it's a problem they've always had and never bothered fixing.

Eric Young is a good wrestler. In fact, I'd argue he's very good. He also was just involved in a pretty damn solid cage match main event and put on a good show, and most of his matches since he came back full time have been solid, too.

Yet outside of a small segment of the crowd, not many people were behind him. Austin Aries was clearly the crowd's favorite in the main event.

We've all said it, but really, I think it may be TNA's perpetual biggest problem - Eric Young is a good wrestler, has a personality, but he was never booked in a way so that the crowd could get behind him on his way to the top. The guys in TNA's history who WERE booked so the crowd could get behind them, namely guys like Styles, Joe, Aries, and a few others, get a brief run at the top, and apparently don't get to sniff it much afterward.

Why does a company that get no less than one million TV viewers a week wind up with PPVs that are lucky to get 10,000 buys? Why does a company with one million minimum viewers a week get house shows that look empty? A lot of recent TNA PPVs have actually had mostly solid in-ring work by the wrestlers, it's tough to pin blame on them. So why?

It's because they have no freaking idea how to make somebody a star, and on the off-chance that they DO get or build a star player, they never let him run with the ball.

Again, EY is a good wrestler, and a great story could've been written around him being the one to dethrone Magnus. Instead, they hotshotted his win, he was stuck with people making inevitable comparisons to the Daniel Bryan storyline, and he's wearing the belt before the bookers gave him real credibility. Samoa Joe and Austin Aries draw the biggest face reactions of the night (and have been doing so for months now), meanwhile, and while they're both solidly upper-midcard/main event, both should have been so friggin' much more.

I know I'm not making any sort of shocking discovery here, I think many of us have said this in one form or another, but Young, to me, is just the starkest example of it: a "homegrown" TNA lifer with personality and in-ring ability who the crowd should love, but because TNA's booking never realizes how important the journey from Point A to Point B is, the crowd winds up feeling largely apathetic toward him. It's maddening, it's something they should've realized and fixed years and years ago, but I fear they never will.

[Magic knows Black Lives Matter]

Pretty much. TNA doesn't know how to make stars. Did you hear WWE calling Daniel Bryan the future? No, they acknowledged him as the best guy (behind Cena) that they have. BECAUSE HE WAS THEIR WORLD CHAMPION. Why were they calling guys like AJ & Daniels "the future" in f***ing 2009? Those guys should be the present! They should be the guys you hype up as the best in the world, bar none. But no, there was always someone like Kurt Angle or Sting that they could fall back on as a "real star." TNA has no idea what they are doing and can't make their own guys. That's pathetic.

I said something very similar to this in a thread about the Diva's division today but it fits here too. What good is having all the utensils in the world if you don't know how to eat?

[Chip]

I haven't watched TNA in two years. Young really looked like a chump tonight. His titantron video was goofy as hell and his theme music was generic. Ended up rooting for Aries by the end of it.

[Deleted]

I would actually say the Menagerie are the case study of TNA's failure. They are a sports Entertainment group, playing a sports entertainment angle in a company who's fans don't want to see sports entertainment. We have all been making that perfectly clear since 2002.

But the fact of the matter is TNA doesn't listen to its fans, and is paying the price.

[MrBRulzOK]

Jun 15, 2014 22:39:05 GMT -5 @torgaddon said:

I would actually say the Menagerie are the case study of TNA's failure. They are a sports Entertainment group, playing a sports entertainment angle in a company who's fans don't want to see sports entertainment. We have all been making that perfectly clear since 2002.

But the fact of the matter is TNA doesn't listen to its fans, and is paying the price.

Well actually they're an entertainment group that has somehow been transplanted into a sport that they have no business being involved with. All because their circus is so run-down and in dire need of money. Still doesn't explain why they decided TNA would be the best place to earn money though. Maybe Knux is just naive to their history of paying performers.

But you do make a good point.

[HMARK Center]

Eh, the idea of "sports entertainment vs. wrestling" has been tossed around that, for me at least, it's lost a lot of meaning. There's always been over the top gimmicks, even in companies that are nominally about "pure" wrestling, and visa versa. It's not so much about the gimmick, as it is about the booking around it making it tough for it to be successful.

On the topic of star-making, the extra frustrating part of it, at least for me, is that I'm not of the mind that TNA needs a guy to be "TNA's Hulk Hogan", or "TNA's John Cena"; while a standalone star can lead to a boom period, there are tons of examples of promotions thriving with multiple main event stars, each bringing their own style to the table. Pushing Samoa Joe or Austin Aries or AJ Styles to the very top wouldn't have to mean pushing the other guys to the middle of the pack; it isn't as if Dusty Rhodes was the only big babyface in the major NWA promotions, for example.

But yeah, as Magiconz said, it just never, ever pans out, the company constantly defaulted to guys like Angle or Sting, and now that those guys are gone or at least fading away, there's nobody to take their place...and again, maybe Joe or Aries could, but they just refuse to put them there, for whatever reason. Maybe EY could've been one of those guys, but they just didn't give him a logical, crowd-drawing buildup.

[Deleted]

TNA's biggest problem is that when someone might actually make them money, they turn them heel, then face then heel then face then heel then face to ensure that no one accidentally cares about them or buys any merch.

If someone buys merch anyway, they are shot in the face.

[Heart Punch]

I would have been for Eric Young being champ back in his "World Elite" days.He is definitely a very talented guy.But now with him being booked as TNA's resident comedian,there is no way you can take him seriously as the WH Champion.And it's showing by the drop in ratings.This was the most obvious ripoff of the WWE that TNA has ever performed.If they thought us fans were that stupid to realize that,then they deserve to go out of business.

[Ragnal]

I've been saying for years since the end of Super Eric that there's no way to take him seriously as a wrestler, so I'm a little biased here. That said, I felt when he was doing the World Elite gimmick he still had that stink to him of being a comedy act, but it was so attached to him that no matter what he did he can't brush it away. I like to refer to it as the "Jimmy Jacobs effect" after seeing JJ go from Lacey-obsessed creep as a comedy act to the leader of the Age of the Fall. Although Marellitis could work just as well.

That said EY as main eventer could have worked had they done everything to convince the fans that they wouldn't treat him as a comedy act ever again, and would give him a serious attempt at pushing him up the card. But they didn't. And when you look back at how EY was treated after Team Canada broke up (Don't Fire Eric, the Roode feud going from comical to serious and then the Super Eric crap), then the "concussion" post-World Elite, I don't think they'd ever have the intention to do so.

[OVO 40 hunched over like he 80]

I think that TNA values more having a "name" than drawing power. For example: back in the early hogan administration they had Christopher Daniels losing to Val Venis.. EY falls in this category, I think the only reason he is champion is because he has a popular show on Animal Planet, one that has kept him relevant for this couple of years when he was barely on TV as the knockout tag team champion with ODB. TNA is not a ppv business its just a tv show, they don't have a 5 year plan, they live week to week.

[BigAl]

Sabin was a good world chump too

[Oh Cry Me a Screwball]

Eric Young could have totally worked as a champion, provided TNA had set it up to where EY gets on the roll of his career, stringing together win after win against guys like Roode, Abyss, Storm, Magnus, Joe, Aries, and anyone else that still somewhat matters in TNA until he finally wins the big one in a well-hyped match.

But, instead he wins a battle royal that wasn't known about until a couple of days before the show, and then won the title in the same night after two years of being an intergender tag team champion in a blatant ripoff of Wrestlemania XXX, on a show where the main selling point was the #WrathOfDixie, and even just jobbed on TV to Bobby Lashley.

And is there any wonder why his title reign correlates to a massive drop in ratings?

[Kevin Hamilton]

Hell you could've made his being a comedy guy/chump part of the build-up and story to his run to the title. Have Magnus or whoever show clips of Eric being a buffoon saying something along the lines of "this is who's going to challenge me?" All the while Eric keeps on coming and winning and won't stop.

Take a page outta the Austin/Mcmahon thing in the sense that Dixie doesn't want this dude as the face of the company (which the DBry thing is just a variation on a theme anyway), and the reason why is his history of being a clown. Yet, again, Eric keeps on winning and climbing the ladder.

Go meta with it-- "Magnus (or whoever) may be your chosen one, but I've been here since day 1 busting my ass.."

And have Eric keep winning.

The champ at the time continues to at least act like they aren't taking Eric serious, though their body language begins to change where the audience can tell even the champ is staring to believe.

THEN you have Eric win.

[cabbageboy]

Thing is, I don't know if Eric Young would be a serious champion even if they had booked it exactly the way everyone wanted. It just looks bad when the company is letting guys go left and right and a guy that no one took seriously ends up the last man in the room and thus gets the title.

[A Platypus Rave]

Jun 15, 2014 22:47:15 GMT -5 HMARK Center said:

Eh, the idea of "sports entertainment vs. wrestling" has been tossed around that, for me at least, it's lost a lot of meaning. There's always been over the top gimmicks, even in companies that are nominally about "pure" wrestling, and visa versa. It's not so much about the gimmick, as it is about the booking around it making it tough for it to be successful.

On the topic of star-making, the extra frustrating part of it, at least for me, is that I'm not of the mind that TNA needs a guy to be "TNA's Hulk Hogan", or "TNA's John Cena"; while a standalone star can lead to a boom period, there are tons of examples of promotions thriving with multiple main event stars, each bringing their own style to the table. Pushing Samoa Joe or Austin Aries or AJ Styles to the very top wouldn't have to mean pushing the other guys to the middle of the pack; it isn't as if Dusty Rhodes was the only big babyface in the major NWA promotions, for example.

But the Major NWA promotions had Ric Flair as their "Hulk Hogan".

Granted it was different because he was a heel when he was doing it, but the same basic principle was there as the main star that helped you built other stars.

Jun 16, 2014 5:59:24 GMT -5 Kevin Hamilton said:

Hell you could've made his being a comedy guy/chump part of the build-up and story to his run to the title. Have Magnus or whoever show clips of Eric being a buffoon saying something along the lines of "this is who's going to challenge me?" All the while Eric keeps on coming and winning and won't stop.

Take a page outta the Austin/Mcmahon thing in the sense that Dixie doesn't want this dude as the face of the company (which the DBry thing is just a variation on a theme anyway), and the reason why is his history of being a clown. Yet, again, Eric keeps on winning and climbing the ladder.

Go meta with it-- "Magnus (or whoever) may be your chosen one, but I've been here since day 1 busting my ass.."

And have Eric keep winning.

The champ at the time continues to at least act like they aren't taking Eric serious, though their body language begins to change where the audience can tell even the champ is staring to believe.

THEN you have Eric win.

Yeah, if they had ANY kind of build it would be fine... but it didn't.

My build had Eric wrestle Magnus in a close match that he loses and then have him train harder and go on a streak of winning against everyone until getting a rematch at Slammiversary or try and build it to Bound for Glory with the BFG tournament where he finally wins.

[HMARK Center]

On the more macro scale, I think the inability to just present a build up like that is directly tied to the inability of TNA to draw PPV or house show numbers.

Frankly, I think it's an issue that would confront WWE more often if they didn't have such a huge cultural cache as a company; however, since WWE IS much more of a mainstream institution, the weird stuff they do bites them far less than it bites a company like TNA, which is still very young in the grand scheme of things and working within a niche market. WWE could do a piss poor job of building up a main event for, say, SummerSlam, but it's still WWE and it's still a recognizable name show, and the letters "WWE" will draw a crowd nearly by default. TNA does not have that luxury, yet they don't alter their way of building events.

It's especially galling now considering how far apart their PPVs and Spike TV specials are spaced, which should, in theory, give them plenty of time to announce a card, build feuds, and not lead to situations like EY being thrust into a position the crowd clearly isn't ready to accept him in yet. However, here we still are: how long was it before we had more than maybe two matches announced for Slammaversary, when the last big card, Lockdown, was about three months ago at this point?

You can't rely on your company's name to sell your shows when you've barely been around over a decade and spent a good portion of that time as a weekly PPV show and have never been a mainstream presence. This is where you absolutely need guys like those I mentioned in the original post, where you absolutely need them in feuds against one another, where the audience can tune in any given week and know "Ok, this guy's the champ, this guy's the challenger, and here's why they're going at one another".

Maybe this just goes to the larger issue of why wrestling, on the whole, is in such a sorry state; people still look to the 90s or early 2000s for ideas concerning what wrestling audiences want, never once realizing that those days are long over, and that companies like ECW, which kind of pioneered the idea of people going to a show more for the brand name and less for the individual talent, were almost always the exception, not the rule.

[bluemeii]

TNA jumped the gun with him by a few months. Instead of putting the belt on him, that's when they should have started building him. Now that they are getting ready to start the BFG Series (I think...has there been an announcement on it yet...should be starting soon if it is), is the time they could have really turned him into a star. Build him up during the series even more while maintaining the "underdog" feel he has.

Just go all in with him the whole time...then when he wins the series and takes the belt at BFG it could be like "wow that whole build felt good, it's awesome he won, he really earned his way to the top". Not earn it as a lifetime achievement award and then try to make him credible. To me it's just backwards booking with him and frankly, I ain't buying it, and from the looks of the ratings (along with other issues) it appears alot of other people aren't either.

But what am I talking about...they would have went that whole route with him building him up for 6-8 months as the face of the company then have him lose to Crazzy Steve in the BFG series finals or something.

[Bram wants to 'urt you]

Thing is, I've always enjoyed EY's work. But now when he comes out, the little voice of wrestling criticism at the back of my mind says -

"Oh, it's EY. It's nice that they've given him a run with the title after his years of hard work."

NOT

"Oh it's EY. It's great that they've put the belt onto a credible champion who can have a decent, believable run with it."

EY, and Sabin before him, should have had a feel-good run with the belt, one we (as fans) enjoyed as it felt like a just reward for a loyal, hardworking performer. And it should have ended with a vile heel stripping our unlikely hero of his belt, elevating the heel's status in the process.

Given TNA's current storyline, they could have used the Magnus/Bram pieces in parallel with EY - Magnus, distraught at losing his title, becomes this vicious animal (aided by his crazy mate Bram), until he reaches the point where he looks ready to hold the belt again, then have him defeat EY resoundingly for the title.

Instead what we have is a guy we largely don't MIND holding the belt, but each time a championship match comes up, we're all speculating (and hoping) someone like a Roode, Joe, Aries etc. will take the belt off him, not because he we want him to lose it, but because we want someone who is evidently more suitable holding it instead. Not a great way to have your supposed top face perceived by the fans.

[HMARK Center]

Jun 16, 2014 14:24:13 GMT -5 Bram wants to 'urt you said:

Thing is, I've always enjoyed EY's work. But now when he comes out, the little voice of wrestling criticism at the back of my mind says -

"Oh, it's EY. It's nice that they've given him a run with the title after his years of hard work."

NOT

"Oh it's EY. It's great that they've put the belt onto a credible champion who can have a decent, believable run with it."

EY, and Sabin before him, should have had a feel-good run with the belt, one we (as fans) enjoyed as it felt like a just reward for a loyal, hardworking performer. And it should have ended with a vile heel stripping our unlikely hero of his belt, elevating the heel's status in the process.

Given TNA's current storyline, they could have used the Magnus/Bram pieces in parallel with EY - Magnus, distraught at losing his title, becomes this vicious animal (aided by his crazy mate Bram), until he reaches the point where he looks ready to hold the belt again, then have him defeat EY resoundingly for the title.

Instead what we have is a guy we largely don't MIND holding the belt, but each time a championship match comes up, we're all speculating (and hoping) someone like a Roode, Joe, Aries etc. will take the belt off him, not because he we want him to lose it, but because we want someone who is evidently more suitable holding it instead. Not a great way to have your supposed top face perceived by the fans.

Good point, and it ties back into one of the last points I made: that TNA traditionally doesn't grasp the importance of the journey from Point A to Point B.

Over the years, the company has delivered things we, as fans, have wanted. We got the AJ vs. Daniels feud back in the day (which, granted, proceeded to never end), we got undefeated Samoa Joe, we got Joe vs. Angle, we saw certain big indy names signed (e.g. Low Ki, Homicide, Jay Lethal, Alex Shelley, Austin Aries, etc.), we got matchups people have wanted to see...but this is a worked sport, not a real one, and you can give fans all the "dream matches" you can think of, they won't care unless you book it in a way that generates fan interest.

When you dedicate too much of your show to heel authority figures cutting promos, you lose out on time to have two guys in a feud simply interact and build up tension for their inevitable confrontation. Fans aren't going to care about, let's say, Austin Aries vs. Kenny King as much until you give a solid storyline where people are invested in these two guys facing one another specifically.

Joe vs. Angle really was a poster child for this, and now EY is a great example of it. Saying "Hey, the fans want to see Joe vs. Angle", or "Hey, the fans like EY and he's a great performer, I bet we could make him World Champ at some point" is fine...now take us on the journey to those things, don't just arrive at Point A, do the thing the fans may have wanted, and then shrug and say "Point B? What's Point B?"

[A Platypus Rave]

Jun 16, 2014 15:14:41 GMT -5 HMARK Center said:

Jun 16, 2014 14:24:13 GMT -5 Bram wants to 'urt you said:

Thing is, I've always enjoyed EY's work. But now when he comes out, the little voice of wrestling criticism at the back of my mind says -

"Oh, it's EY. It's nice that they've given him a run with the title after his years of hard work."

NOT

"Oh it's EY. It's great that they've put the belt onto a credible champion who can have a decent, believable run with it."

EY, and Sabin before him, should have had a feel-good run with the belt, one we (as fans) enjoyed as it felt like a just reward for a loyal, hardworking performer. And it should have ended with a vile heel stripping our unlikely hero of his belt, elevating the heel's status in the process.

Given TNA's current storyline, they could have used the Magnus/Bram pieces in parallel with EY - Magnus, distraught at losing his title, becomes this vicious animal (aided by his crazy mate Bram), until he reaches the point where he looks ready to hold the belt again, then have him defeat EY resoundingly for the title.

Instead what we have is a guy we largely don't MIND holding the belt, but each time a championship match comes up, we're all speculating (and hoping) someone like a Roode, Joe, Aries etc. will take the belt off him, not because he we want him to lose it, but because we want someone who is evidently more suitable holding it instead. Not a great way to have your supposed top face perceived by the fans.

Good point, and it ties back into one of the last points I made: that TNA traditionally doesn't grasp the importance of the journey from Point A to Point B.

Over the years, the company has delivered things we, as fans, have wanted. We got the AJ vs. Daniels feud back in the day (which, granted, proceeded to never end), we got undefeated Samoa Joe, we got Joe vs. Angle, we saw certain big indy names signed (e.g. Low Ki, Homicide, Jay Lethal, Alex Shelley, Austin Aries, etc.), we got matchups people have wanted to see...but this is a worked sport, not a real one, and you can give fans all the "dream matches" you can think of, they won't care unless you book it in a way that generates fan interest.

When you dedicate too much of your show to heel authority figures cutting promos, you lose out on time to have two guys in a feud simply interact and build up tension for their inevitable confrontation. Fans aren't going to care about, let's say, Austin Aries vs. Kenny King as much until you give a solid storyline where people are invested in these two guys facing one another specifically.

Joe vs. Angle really was a poster child for this, and now EY is a great example of it. Saying "Hey, the fans want to see Joe vs. Angle", or "Hey, the fans like EY and he's a great performer, I bet we could make him World Champ at some point" is fine...now take us on the journey to those things, don't just arrive at Point A, do the thing the fans may have wanted, and then shrug and say "Point B? What's Point B?"

Point B?