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To be fair, Meltzer's write up in the Observer was a bit vague, though he did make it clear that he wasn't returning to WWE to be a wrestler or TV character. The term "business relationship" was used to describe what Lesnar's negotiations with WWE were about, but he didn't make clear that it was for an endorsement deal. I enjoy Bryan poking fun at Scherer, but really Dave and Bryan can be almost as bad. Complaining about certain MMA media reports without telling their listeners who they're talking about.

Didn't Schiavone try to get the Executive Producer job Eric Bischoff ended up getting in early 1993? I imagine being passed over for a less experienced and inferior announcer likely helped lead to his later apathy.

Yeah, if there was a weakness with Punk's promo is that it kind of blew off the personal issue with Cena to shoot on the promotion.

To be fair to John, no-one's ever really got to the bottom of Danielson's firing. I do tend to believe Randazzo's story in PowerSlam that Linda McMahon's political campaign was behind his firing, but it's not like anyone has confirmed who freaked out and caused his firing, so I can understand someone still believing it was a work all along.

June 2009 was Donald Trump buying Raw!

From a logical perspective, this should lead to Triple H vs. CM Punk at SummerSlam, but I'm guessing it doesn't.

Yeah, Chavo's not speaking. He may be frustrated with WWE now, but he isn't going to burn his bridges like that. If he keeps quiet, then he'll probably be brought back as a road agent after he washes out of TNA. To be fair to WWE, one would have thought Chavo would have worked better with Sin Cara than most on the roster, given that he worked with the luchadors in WCW fairly often.

Listening to Cary Silkin's interview for 411Mania, Gary Juster (via Jim Cornette) was the conduit to Joe Koff (who's a big fan) and Sinclair Broadcasting. Juster had been wanting to get back into the business for awhile but didn't know how, and he had the contacts inside Sinclair Broadcasting. Apparently the deal was about 18 months in the making, which makes sense as they announced their debut for Charlotte that Juster was involved in promoting in January 2010.

I always thought that book made Jim Wilson's claims against Jim Barnett in his earlier book Chokehold seem a lot more credible.

To be fair, it's one of the best DVD ideas they've had in a long time. Shawn Michaels is great, but how many career retrospective DVDs can you have? I mean you could probably squeeze out one more, but they really need to start thinking out of the box for DVD titles, given that all the biggest names have at least one career compilation.

I'll trump Cox's statement with "some of the biggest marks are the ones who are backstage".

TNA would never get enough text messages to overload their system though! ;-)

I suppose it's possible that Punk has signed a short term contract extension to recreate the dynamic of his ROH title run. WWE did do something similar with Jeff Hardy a couple of years ago.

You bought it for the Nicole Bass feature I'm sure, rovert. Yeah, I think I bought one of those mags too once. The PWI almanac was a great find as a British mark.

I don't think putting the title on Page was a mistake, but attempting to turn him in the match he won the title in was.

The Piper segment did seem a bit shoot-ish. Russo came out there looking very uncomfortable, and he's not that good an actor. And then the Harris brothers came out to get between Piper and Russo, also not looking like they were acting, but more like they really were protecting their boss from this crazy old wrestler. But then again this is Piper we're talking about, he's infamous for going off script in his televised promos, so who knows what the deal was. My sense is Piper was given an open mic and was just told to shoot on Russo, no script or bullet points. Russo writes this up in his book like it's the greatest segment in wrestling history and he was one of the hottest heels ever.

When Impact went head to head with the three hour draft edition of Raw last year, TNA drew a 0.5 rating, unopposed they usually draw in the 1.05-1.25 range, so it's safe to say a large proportion of their fan base are wrestling fans who are willing to watch wrestling more than once a week.

I think those matches have become less common ever since Russo got more power and Bischoff and Hogan came in.

Yeah, Russo was the one who came up with the Voodoo Kin Mafia gimmick, it's one of the first things he did when he was rehired as head writer. What makes the Russo rehiring so dumb is that they rehired him at the same time they had signed Kurt Angle. At least Russo didn't screw up Angle's debut match, but it was all quickly downhill from there.

I think if Panda Energy ever did decide to throw in the towel, then someone else would take the company over. If it's WWE and the company is essentially folded, then another promotion will likely rise from its ashes. JCP spawned WCW spawned TNA. The Tri-State Wrestling Alliance spawned ECW spawned ROH. Sure, short term some people would be worse off, but long term who knows? TNA at this point is a depressing money pit and will stay that way, as Vince Russo, Eric Bischoff and Hulk Hogan have their claws into the power positions in the company. I'd have a lot more confidence in the industry regenerating itself if the plug was pulled by the Carters on TNA than the state we're in now.

More worthwhile is Bryan Alvarez writing the following sentence in his Figure Four Weekly newsletter after watching the comedy match on Impact two weeks ago where Eric Young pinned Mr Anderson dressed as the Great Muta:

The best example yet: TNA wrestler Jesse Neal tweets that he's qualified for food stamps!

It's worth noting that with all the talent and star power TNA's had over the last five years, it takes special skill to produce a product that is so universally loathed.

This question was originally posed by Loss just over four years ago. And amazingly since then things have gotten a lot worse.