Giving TNA Credit Where Credit is Due

TNA is the Springfield tire fire of professional wrestling. It feels like it's been around forever and no reasonable person can justify its existence. At this point it just exists. It's there. It's stink can be smelled from many states away. It's useless. It's ugly. It somehow will not die.

But as the old saying goes, even a burning tire yard is right twice a day. And last week while watching TNA something happened to me that I'm not sure has ever happened to me while watching TNA: I was genuinely interested, engaged and excited about what was onscreen, for all of the reasons intended.

TNA has been around for a long time. I still lived with my parents when TNA began to exist. I own a home now. I was still in college when TNA began. I work for the government and have some gray hairs now. Beck came out with "Sea Change" around when TNA began. Now he just released "Morning Phase", which is his only other album that sounds a lot like Sea Change. Many of my friends have gotten married and had children since TNA's existence. Others have married and already divorced. My first pet, Inky the cat, did not live as long as TNA has lived. TNA has still not ever done anything as cool as Inky a) catching bats, b) catching a rabbit, c) learning how to turn on/off a light switch.

But they got me excited for 7 minutes. Last week the show started off with an Abyss/Eric Young brawl, and it was awesome. Abyss is clearly the worst worker in the world over the last decade. I'm sure there have been some individual performances that have been worse, but he has turned in a full 10+ years of shockingly horrible work. I'll save more Abyss talk for a future post dedicated to Abyss and nothing else. This "match" was all about EY and he looked killer. A lot of his shots really landed hard on Abyss, and TNA's stupid faux-NYPD Blue backstage camera work actually made this look, dare I say...cool? This felt like one of the most violent things in TNA history, culminating with EY getting choked out over the ropes with a chain. EY took nasty spills the whole match (including getting tossed face first into a chair) but good god his face was turning purple while getting choked. The whole thing actually felt unique and interesting, which is something TNA has NEVER felt like to me. It actually made me want to tune in the next week...

And they started the 3/27 Impact with 27 minutes of talking. Never change guys. We'll always have those 7 minutes on 3/20.