Post "New" Monday Night War: For One Night, Pro Wrestling Was Fun Again

At least for one night, it felt fun to be a pro wrestling fan.

The love affair with the "sport" began for me like so many others - in the 80s. I can't remember what the first wrestling match was that I saw, but I know what WWF Superstars of Wrestling on Saturday afternoons meant, what renting videos from Coliseum Video meant, and the first time I saw Hulk Hogan wrestle King Kong Bundy at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, ME.

While the early part of the 1990s weren't the greatest for us, the latter part of the decade brought the "Monday Night Wars" - the tagline for what became a head-to-head TV programming battle between WWF/E and the now defunct-WCW. The business was white-hot, millions upon millions watched wrestling Monday nights and pop culture icons like Steve Austin, The Rock, Goldberg and more were created as a result.

In a story much too detailed, sordid and sad to recall here, the WWE eventually won out and did the previously unthinkable in buying WCW for a mere pittance from AOL/Time Warner. What followed since then has been a down period in what's been a cyclical business over time. While WWE is now a publicly traded company and is a major force with its brand of entertainment worldwide, ratings are not terrible, but are a far cry from what they used to be.

The product is stale because of several reasons, most of which stem from a tired creative approach that is need of a top-to-bottom overhaul.

As in any industry, you need competition to stay lively and WWE hasn't had any....until about seven years ago when a fledgling company called TNA started running weekly PPVs with former WWE talent and young prospects looking to make a name for themselves.

Since then, the company has gone through a number of different re-skins and has morphed into its present form on Thursdays on Spike TV. But they have never been a massive threat with paltry PPV numbers and a rating that has stayed fairly flat for a long, long time.

Even though they are creatively chided within the internet community for baffling storylines and creative direction (see a trend?), TNA has what so many other companies would love: a two-hour slot on a major national cable network. Give them some credit for that.

Which brings us to Monday night. They recently made the decision to bring in Hulk Hogan and former WCW head Eric Bischoff to drive the ship as part of a bigger deal with Spike and TNA decided to debut the duo's new vision with a three-hour live show on Monday head-to-head with RAW just like the old days.

While the timing could have better (the previous two weeks leading up to the show were the holidays which are effectively dead TV time), there was still plenty of interest within the internet wrestling community in what many coined the "new Monday Night Wars." Even with a company like TNA, people felt hope for the wrestling business for the first time in a long, long, long time.

TNA certainly had a list of mistakes Monday from the opening cage match, completely missing on the presentation of legend Ric Flair and former WWE Champion Jeff Hardy and an NCAA-style approach with commercials that was maddening at times to sit through.

But they tried and brought their best Monday, creating a largely compelling program that was hard to turn away from. There was a reason to flip back and forth as WWE brought Bret Hart back in a much-anticipated kickoff to a Wrestlemania angle that has been over a decade in the making. While the rest of the WWE show featured horrendous comedy like always, they at least had something unique to combat TNA's new coat of paint.

So where do we go from here? The ratings will tell a lot. There's no plan to move TNA full-time to Mondays, meaning that it's back to taped shows on Thursdays starting next week. But Spike is all about the numbers and if they feel that Monday was a success, they might experiment again and if that goes well, we just might have another fun battle on our hands. In the end, it's the television business driving it.

But that's all speculation for another day. I'm just enjoying what I saw Monday night from TNA and hope they can keep the momentum going. A little competition could do the WWE - and other disenchanted wrestling fans like myself - some good.

Josh Nason has published MMA, wrestling and boxing blog Ropes, Ring and Cage.com since 2007. He is a contributor to Fight Magazine and Bleacher Report and appears regularly on Fight Network Radio and Mauro Ranallo's Fight Show. Follow him on Twitter.