TNA: Itchweeed To Stankweeed, Jeff Is A Heel!

So TNA Bound For Glory 10-10-10 came to pass.  "THEY" appeared to take over.  A couple of weeks ago I gave My predictions of who THEY would be, since THEY were already there and had been there since January.  The ringleaders and puppetmaster were revealed as Hollywood Hulk Hogan and Eazy-E Eric Bischoff, just as I knew they would be.  However a few of My predictions fell short, and there were a couple of suprises.  I had fully expected that during the three on two handicap match that Samoa Joe and Kevin Nash would turn on their respective partners.  Of course that did not happen, but to My surprise Jeff Jarret turned out to be the one aligned with THEY.  Second prediction not to come to pass, Kurt Angle did not win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship.  That honor went to Jeff Hardy, who was also aligned with THEY, a group that for the time being at least is calling itself Immortal.

History, whether a work or not tends to repeat itself.  The closing moments of Bound For Glory 2010 no doubt took many long time fans back to 1996 and WCW Bash At The Beach.  You could say THEY gave you the biggest hint as to what was going to happen since both pay-per-views took place in the same building and a little over 14 years apart.  The image of Jeff Hardy standing in the ring with Hogan and Bischoff as fans threw trash in the ring vividly mirrored Hogan himself standing with Scott Hall and Kevin Nash 14 plus years earlier as fans threw trash into the ring when Hogan revealed himself to be aligned with The Outsiders.

Jeff Hardy.  The charismatic enigma.  The rainbow-haired warrior.  The insane and twisted Itchweeed himself!  Oh, no!  Jeff Hardy has gone heel.  It is the most terrible thing to happen in his career.

Or is it really?

Let's face facts.  Sometimes a heel turn can make a wrestler's career.  The history of the business is replete with faces turning heel and it working wonders for their career:  Chris Jericho, Barry Wyndham, Stan Lane,
Shawn Michaels, Shad Gaspard.  (Okay I am still waiting on the last one to pay off, but I still say he is the destined to be the new Shawn Michaels).  When you look back to 1996, when Hulk Hogan became Hollywood Hogan, it revitalized his career.  He was still popular, and without a doubt the most famous wrestler alive (as he still is), but without joining the nWo and turning heel Hogan really had no where else to go.  He made the heel turn, joined the nWo and changed wrestling history forever.

Now, remember again, history has a way of repeating itself.  But I will get to that in a minute.  First let Me turn My attention to Jeff Hardy.

Turning heel is going to work wonders for Jeff's popularity and career.  I realize from what little he had said on TNA Impact! this Thursday that the development of his persona is in a embryonic stage, but I did love the fact that he sounded like a cross between Robert De Niro as Max Cady in Cape Fear, the Hal 9000 Computer from 2001 and Raven.  A good gimmick does not come overnight.  Remember Hogan was paraphrasing "Anything else would be uncivilized," from a commercial he had done between working for the WWF and WCW for several weeks before someone finally came up with, "nWo 4 Life".

Jeff has the histroy to be the guy who was doing everything he could for the fans, putting his body on the line for little reward other than the cheers of the crowd.  Anyone who has followed his career knows that he spent a majority of his WWF/WWE career as probably the most popular wrestler who never went anywhere.  Jeff was stuck high on the mid-card, either being a tag team champion with his brother Matt, or fighting back and forth battles for the Intercontinental Championship, while in the meantime guys like John Cena, Brock Lesnar, Randy Orton and Edge were being handed world titles left and right, and all but one of those guys came along after Jeff had his career well established.

I think it is fitting that Taz has talked Jeff up to this point as a former world champion.  WWE squandered his talent and missed their mark by not keeping either the WWE or WWE World Heavyweight Championship on him for any length of time.  They blew the WWE Championship title reign on a pointless feud with his brother, when they just should have kept their aborted plans to unveil Christian as Jeff's mystery assailant.  I know I would have much rather seen a feud between the Hardys and Edge and Christian rekindled that the series of matches that Jeff had against Matt.  Jeff's World Heavyweight Championship reigns were wasted to do nothing other than to put C.M. Punk over as a heel (another late comer to the WWE who already had longer world world title reigns than all of Jeff's combined, and you can include his days served thus far as TNA World Heavyweight Champion in on that.)

So he has the backstory of the world champion who barely ever was and was never given the chance to really speak by his former employer.  (And as a reminder, to keep you from forgetting, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were former disgruntled WWF employees when they first showed up in WCW).  But what else does Jeff have to bring to the table as a heel?  A heel has to speak, a lot, and in the past Jeff has always been seen as more of a man of action than of words.  Jeff's brief heel run in the WWF when he and Matt were the New Brood, he really did not do any speaking.  However, although I have not seen much from his early days in OMEGA, I do know that one of the characters he played there, Will-O-The-Wisp, was quite the talker.  And if you have ever watched The Hardy Show and seen Jeff play Itchweeed you know he can talk some seriously funny and insane shit.  Perhaps he needs to develop a character along those lines for TNA.  Let's call him Stankweeed, and he can be a heel who is funny and entertaining on a different level than Hall and Nash.

So how will Jeff ultimately play out as his heel personal in TNA develops?  Only time will tell, however he needs to be allowed to come into it on his own, and not play it as a Hogan or Bischoff directed character.  The fate of TNA is now in Jeff's hands, and the role he plays as the bad guy is going to make or break the company.  You may think that sounds unlikely, but the fact is he wants to be the make guy and not the make it for a couple of years guy.

Coming off what TNA Wrestling considers its biggest pay-per-view, Bound For Glory, TNA Impact! was an exercise in disappointment, and wrestling fans know that the WWE Monday Night Raw following a Wrestlemania is something special and spectacular.  Again I was taken back to any given WCW Monday Nitro in the late 1990s.  As soon as the as the shot panned into the arena The nWo Theme hit and Hogan and Bischoff come strutting out through the pyro.  Then began what Chris Jericho called in his book A Lion's Tale: Around The World In Spandex, One of the nWo's "endless opening promos."  The high point was when Fortune came out, although I expected from those early days of the nWo that TNA'a top heel faction was coming to save the day, it pleasantly turned out to be something different.  I did see it coming, knew Hogan and Flair were going to hug and not fight before Flair had his trusty Rolex off.  That was innovative and refreshing, however already it meant that Immortal had as many members as it took the nWo to pick up in nine months.  Ric Flair hugged Hollywood Hogan, and that My friends was the highpoint of the night.

The opening promo lasted for 30 minutes.  Then for another 20 minutes there was backstage action between Dixie Carter, Kevin Nash and Sting, followed by more of the same between Carter, Hogan and Bischoff.  At 50 minutes in there was finally a match.  (If you can call it that).  The worst TNA Knock-Outs Match in history.  I'd rather watch the late Rhonda Sing and Harvey Wippleman in a dress rolling around in a kiddie pool full of gravy.  TNA has always provided half-respectable women's wrestling, but I think we can kiss that goodbye as long as Bischoff has any power.  Then the only time the show really came alive, Kurt Angle's confrontation with Jeff Jarret, but even that was brief and not as deeply personal as it could have gotten.  One hour and 20 minutes in we finally had a real match between Abyss and Samoa Joe, followed by a five on one handicap match between Fortune and the Pope.  Unfortunately since I refuse to watch TNA Reaction the DVR cut off after the match between RVD and Mr. Anderson barely began, but I have a sinking feeling of how things went down.  And just to say one last thing about Reaction, at least when Nitro went to three hours it was two hours of wrestling and an hour of promos, and not this pseudo doucumentary crap that is so boring the only way to hook anyone into watching it is to run Impact! over into its time-slot.  LIKE EVERY FUCKING WEEK!  At least WWE had enough respect for the fans to take WWE NXT off brodcast television in the U.S.

Whether it was a work or whether it was a shoot, Kevin Nash and Sting were shown doing the right thing by walking away from TNA.  Since it has gone from zero to late 1990's WCW Monday Nitro in less than a week it would be a clear sign to a blind man that the Titanic is sinking.  Bischoff (ATM Eric) was once thought of as a wonder in the business, but it is fairly apparent he was a one hit wonder.  The only way to prove Me wrong is for something really new and innovative to happen in TNA, which I feel that he and Hogan understand the things that make it work as much as Vince McMahon understood what made ECW work.  Despite the fact that Bischoff had perhaps the longest stint as WWE Raw General Manager he really did not do anything too inovative in his tenure.  If the idea is to rehash the nWo in the hopes of drawing ratings it will only work for the short term.  If the fans do not have a new and spetacular angle within, I would say, six months, then this will end only in one way, with Vince McMahon chuckling to himself as he purchaces the TNA archives to run on WWE Classics On-Demand.

So if Bischoff fails it will be up to Jeff Hardy, the Charasmatic Heel, to carry TNA into the future.  Given the mic, the motivation, the chance, and above all the right persona, Jeff can out talk Austin, Cena, JBL, Randy Orton or any other guy off the street that WWE has given a chance to while overlooking Jeff for years.  If Jeff does not step up and assert himself backstage and design a character to stand along with the greats TNA Wrestling will either go out of business or be sent packing into relative obsurity like the National Wrestling Alliance.