Dixie Carter screws up, makes TNA look desperate in pointless plea, and could get them and Spike TV in trouble

[Bix]

Sapolsky isn't really any good, though.

[El-P]

TV writing has replaced booking anyway. There are no experienced, successful, relatively young bookers anymore. Paul Heyman was the last of the mohicans, and he got dry by 1997 in ECW. That said he wouldn't do worse than Russo & Bischoff, I don't think anyone would at this point.

[Jingus]

Sapolsky isn't really any good, though.

Saying he's not any good implies that there's recent bookers or promoters who are better. To find anyone who accomplished more than Sapolsky, you'd have to go all the way up to Vince himself. And I'd find it weird to say that McMahon is the only guy in all of wrestling who is any good at it. Hell, in a few small ways Gabe was better than Heyman. You didn't hear stories about ROH being held together with duct tape and bounced checks like ECW often was. Gabe didn't seem to have Heyman's ambition, which in financial terms for an indy wrestling company is actually a good thing. While countless other promoters spent themselves into bankruptcy, Sapolsky maintained a relatively conservative business model and at least broke even often enough to keep going.

 

The TV thing is a stumbling block, and it's true that nobody out there seems to know how to do this shit. Heyman is indeed the closest candidate, but it's a big jump between Hardcore TV in 1996 and Impact in 2010. TNA's problems now are so awful that it would take a truly great booker to turn them around. They seem to be operating under the same old WCW delusion that if they can find the magical combination of exactly what the fans want to see, then suddenly their ratings will double or some shit like that. Yet they never really try to change said combination. "If we keep twirling the numbers to 3, 14, and 27, I'm sure that it'll unlock eventually! Never mind the fact that we've been trying every different variant of those numbers for years and it's never worked yet!" It's often been said that the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same actions and expecting different outcomes, and TNA is completely certifiable.

 

And besides that, Dixie would have to suddenly get a hell of a lot smarter in terms of who she listens to. There are rumors of heavy budget cuts in the future; does anyone doubt that it will probably be a bunch of X division kids, Knockouts, and midcarders whom creative has nothing for that wind up getting cut? I.E., the exact people who cost them the least money? Even if they did bring in a Heyman, he'd have to be much more politically savvy at working in this backstabbing corporate environment than he ever was in the past. Despite his reputation as an unrepentant con man, Paul E seemed to spend most of his WCW and WWE tenure with little if any real backstage power, so clearly his work wasn't working those he needed to work the most.

[Grimmas]

Scott D'Amore was pretty good in 2005.

 

Ian Rotten? IWA-MS had some good shows, he couldn't be worse than Russo.

 

The guy behind JAPW?

 

Any old school wrestler that recently retired and is someway up on current trends. Maybe Raven? I don't know.

 

Anyone is going to be better than Russo.

[Grimmas]

Sorry double post.

[rovert]

Adam Pearce?

[Bob Morris]

I'd second the motion on Scott D'Amore. Sounds like when it was him and Mike Tenay doing the booking, TNA had a pretty good product.

[S.L.L.]

This is something that's been asked many times, and I've been writing about the issue for a couple of years now. Looking back, my opinions really haven't changed at all.

 

On Gabe:

 

The "superbooker as company savior" approach is probably not a great approach for TNA, as that kind of visionary figure just doesn't exist right now to my knowledge. They might benefit more from an Eric Bischoff/Gabe Sapolsky "creative administrator" type. Someone who has a solid, functional idea of what the promotion should be like and what kind of direction they should take, who can then field specific ideas from bookers/agents/wrestlers/whatever and, if they approve, work those into the show accordingly in an orderly and satisfactory fashion. The Vince McMahon/Vince Russo "big idea man" just doesn't seem to exist in any capacity that would be meaningful for the company. So it would be nice to have someone with a more general vision who could look inside the company and see if there are any brains worth picking.

That said, while Bischoff and Sapolsky might be the right type of booker TNA needs, pretty clear to me that neither of those guys should actually be that booker. "Someone who has a solid, functional idea of what the promotion should be like and what kind of direction they should take"...Gabe was really good at accepting the ideas of others, but he had a pretty clear overall direction for the company - particularly the World Title scene - that worked nicely for ROH for a while, but ultimately became detrimental once a lot of his top talent started going elsewhere, and the guys he was left with just didn't fit the mold he wanted. That's pretty commonplace for wrestling promoters. They find something that works for them, but when it stops working, they can't/won't move on to something new. For what it's worth, a lot of that key ROH talent that left - mainly Samoa Joe, Homicide, and to a lesser extent, Nigel McGuiness - went to TNA. But trying to recreate TNA as ROH doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me. The undercard might get better if anyone has the creative spark that Danielson and Hero did when they pitched the ROH/CZW feud, or that Jimmy Jacobs did when he pitched all of his angles. The main event scene might provide better matches depending on who's in it, but the booking of it would be a tough sell for potential line-crossers. He's not the worst choice. He's certainly a better choice than what they have now. But he's not the guy you want if you're trying to make TNA a mainstream success.

 

On D'Amore:

 

Scott D'Amore has problems of his own. I speak more for his run after TNA got on Spike than before, but he was booking in a holding pattern at that point, which is something I could see him being good at. As really, the story of Scott D'Amore's booking when they got to television was that he could come up with a solid premise for an angle, got when he played the angle out over time, he would inevitably botch it horribly. There were still good matches semi-regularly, but if the company is actually looking to go somewhere, he is probably not the guy you want in charge.

Example I always point to is his handling of the 3/4LK break-up and the emergence of LAX, which was not only botched horribly, but was botched by - amongst other things - booking LAX as Quebec separatists, since there's no way you can point to anyone other than D'Amore to blame for that.

 

And well, that is kinda par for the course with D'Amore's booking. He puts forward the basic idea of an angle - Kip James gets accepted into 3LK via Bob Armstrong, Konnan takes offense, forms LAX, mugs Bullet Bob, and LAX and 3LK (or just the James Boys) feud. It is a perfectly fine angle. Outside of Homicide, it has no one I actually want to see wrestle, but has some charismatic dudes in it who could make the feud compelling. And that seemed to be where it was going. There were a couple of weeks where this angle was the most watchable thing on Impact. Everyone was cutting really strong promos, and you got kinda excited to see where this thing was going, even though it seemed unlikely to lead to any good matches. D'Amore managed to hold it together until Konnan's heel turn, and then it just completely fell apart.

 

D'Amore's a guy who has some good, smiple but effective ideas, but he has no idea how to carry them out. I could see him as a guy pitching angles for TNA, but really needs someone else to actually book those angles.

On "anyone but Russo":

 

It's not hard to find bookers better than Russo, but that's setting the bar really, really low. Finding a booker so much better than Russo that he'll actually make TNA into something that could actually be successful is another story.

 

The hard truth is that looking for a great booker with a proven track record is probably not going to get TNA what they need. Most established bookers have a concrete idea of what a wrestling promotion should be. Taking over for a new promotion almost always means they'll try to adapt that idea to the promotion rather than carving a new identity for it, which is something TNA desperately needs. The answer - whatever it may be, probably lies in an untested quantity, at least one that's untested as a head booker. If I'm Dixie Carter, I start scouring the company's staff and the roster to see if there's anyone already under contract who might be able to pull that off. If that fails...well, Jimmy Jacobs doesn't seem to be up to too much these days....

[tomk]

Gabe was really good at accepting the ideas of others, but he had a pretty clear overall direction for the company - particularly the World Title scene - that worked nicely for ROH for a while, but ultimately became detrimental once a lot of his top talent started going elsewhere, and the guys he was left with just didn't fit the mold he wanted.

I dislike being in position of Gabe defender as I'd much rather see Beau James book a national TV show than Gabe. But...

It should be said that FIP was a very different product than ROH. Same crew aimed at a different audience worked differently for that audience, with diffferent angles for that audience.

EVOLVE (at least the first show) was filled with mediocre talent and guys I just don't want to see but had interesting backstage angles and "sports entertainmt"ish stuff and a format that kept matches short.

[S.L.L.]

I hadn't really taken that into consideration, I admit. Gabe adapting his FIP booking to TNA feels like something that might work. I have my doubts about whether or not he'd do that, but if he did, I could see him working.