I think Orton's finisher always looks too genteel. He doesn't come down with enough velocity, so it looks more like foreplay than a wrestling finisher.
At any rate, Rhino's promo told me tonight that, as a wrestling fan, TNA is what I want to watch. That had passion. That had fire. That had charisma. That had frustration, and pent up aggression that I want to see set free on some poor sap that gets in Rhino's way.
The problem is that wrestling works like writing a research paper. Three steps:
Intro: Tell them what you're gonna do.
Body: Do it.
Conclusion: Tell them what you just did.
Unfortunately for TNA, with only an hour, they can't seem to set on who they want to push. Far too frequently they get through the introduction part, then all of a sudden that person/group gets set aside as a peripheral character on the program. I think that Monty Brown and Ron Killings get this treatment the worst (though I'm not ready to declare racism, though, ironically, I think that LAX got this as well, since they were put in that stupid pseudo-announcer/work stoppage storyline).
The time format of the show inhibits doing this for multiple people, but TNA needs to follow through. I'm stoked about Rhino. I want to see him
ing kill someone next week. I'm just afraid that won't happen.
Now, of course, he was a little too vague in his promo; too few people, I imagine, know that he was fired over a flower pot. While it may be important to his character to explain that part of him, what came out of his mouth was too presumptuous of the knowledge of the average fan. John Q non-wrestling-website-reading Fan probably has no
in' idea what he just said. It's a minor thing, but it could easily get in the way of developing fan attachment.
Good wrestling tonight. I'm glad that Steiner seems to have redeemed himself since his WWE days. I was a fan of him then, though I will never admit that he had even a remotely watchable match during his tenure there. He's the perfect guy: he's well-known, he's still in fantastic shape, regardless of how well he'd fare in a drug test, and he "knows his spot": the guy near the top whose job it is to usher in the next era of wrestlers. I don't think you'll ever see Hogan in that role, or HHH, or Austin, or...you get the idea. Too few big names hang around after their glory days to "pass the torch." Steiner deserves a lot of kudos for that.
I'm also really digging the Shane Douglas/Naturals skits. I'm excited to see how that pans out; it may be awhile, since the tag division seems to have lost some focus recently; maybe I'm wrong about that. I dunno.
Eric Young is still entertaining, though he may be running into the realm of predictable and overbearing. Less is more sometimes.
Slick Johnson needs to put on generic ref stripes and stay the
out of the way. The only good ref angle ever was the "evil Hebner" angle that led to Andre winning the belt, and the tournament at Wrestlemania IV (not to be confused with the real-life "evil Hebner" storyline that culminated in Survivor Series 1997).
I'm still no fan of the Nash v the X-Division storyline, though I admit Nash is funny (but, in wrestling, anything resembling humor but without poop and pee jokes is fine by me at this
ing point). I don't think it does anything for the X-guys.
Man, just thinking of all the guys who weren't on tonight (James Gang/3D, AMW, Senshi, et al.) make me clamor for a two-hour show.
I think I'm going to start to follow TNA more closely. It's like a nice sorbet to cleanse your palette after the awful appetizer known as Raw and ECW.
whole... f'n... show...
