B/R Weekly Pro-Wrestling Mailbag!

Welcome the second edition of the B/R Weekly Wrestling Mailbag, where you ask the questions, and I give you the answer.

Now, I am sure I will miss something down the road, but that is why I love comments. Because if I miss something, you can add your opinion too. As many know, I hate to keep people waiting, so let's go.

The first question is from a guy who is new to the wrestling section, Leroy Watson.

Leroy asks: “In light of a piece you did earlier this week, what do you think has happened to Tag Team Wrestling? Once a big part of wrestling, it seems like it is dying.”

I agree with Leroy a bit here. Tag Team wrestling has gone downhill, but more so in the WWE. It is a shame, too, because I remember times where tag team wrestling was something I looked forward to watching, especially in WWE. 

The WWE has the worst tag wrestling of any wrestling organization televised right now. Heck, ROH is even better.

However, the best tag wrestling is in TNA right now. They have been doing a Dudley Invitational tag team tournament there for the past few weeks. And, I can safely say that it is some of the best tag wrestling I have seen in a while.

They have great teams there, and that was before the tag tournament.

Beer Money Inc., LAX, Motor City Machine Guns, and The Dudleys just to name a few.

Now a new team has come out of nowhere and has been surprisingly good, The British Invasion.  TNA had Doug Williams on its roster for over a year and didn’t use him once.  They just didn’t have anything good for him, and they knew he would die in singles wrestling.

So they teamed him up with former Gladiator, Brutus Magnus. And they added some muscle to the group too, to add an intimidation factor.

I feel they will do very well there as a tag team for some time.

And they are relatively young too, so they can be there for the next five to eight years and make sure tag wrestling is something to see. And even more teams have shown promise there too.

The WWE thinks because they are the top dog that anything they do must be right. And they clearly feel singles wrestling is the way to go, and fans are not interested in tag wrestling anymore.

While they will have tag titles, it will mainly be a stepping stone for wrestlers. They will not be great tag team specialists, they will just win the belts and get some recognition.

Then when the WWE feels they are ready, they will end the tag team and push both or one of them to singles wrestling.

We have seen it too many times from them; they even tried to do it to the Dudleys if you remember. Neither Bubba nor D-Von shine in singles wrestling, but they still do in tag wrestling. 

The fact is, pushing stars out of their tag teams can be a bad idea, because some can shine in singles at the same time easily while still being great in the tag division. 

Just look at Edge and Christian or Matt and Jeff Hardy. All won singles titles while still being active in their tag teams when they won many of them. 

Of course, they did a few angles where they betrayed each other (Matt and Jeff had a spectacular such story line just this past winter and spring).

But, if you look back all won tag titles together, yet still won singles gold, too. Perhaps not World Titles at this time, but just about every other title.

Yet, they remained viable tag teams for many years.

People like watching tag wrestling. For some reason, the WWE does not accept that. As I mentioned before, that it is somewhat dying there.

JR mentioned in a recent blog that you cannot throw teams together and expect to have a great tag team.

And while I agree with that, the fact is that you do not have to do so. You can gradually get them together, starting in the developmental promotions.

Obviously some are not good to begin with. Then you have a team like Miz and Morrison, two guys who were rather new to the big leagues. Morrison, of course, had been one half of MNM and won three tag team titles in his rookie year alone.

Miz and Morrison were arguably the best new tag team the WWE has had in a while before their split.

They were seemingly the only great tag team at the time. So, the WWE pushed them hard.  It was good to see, because those guys treated us to some great tag wrestling. And they were heels, on top of that. Yet fans loved seeing them together.

However, the WWE followed their recent MO: they made them part ways, and since they were so popular from the tag team, people knew who they were. They received pushes when they broke them apart. Again, that was textbook WWE.

They put them together just enough to get them bigger in the company and then tore them apart and put them in singles.

I can say without any doubt, that this team saved Miz’s career. Morrison was destined for greatness in the WWE anyway and has all the talent in the world; he could be in the World Title mix within the next couple of years.

He has been a great singles star before, winning many singles titles, such as the Intercontinental Title and ECW Title.

However, Miz needed more popularity and heat as a heel to save his job.

Now, he is not doing to bad on RAW. And Morrison is doing quite well on SmackDown. But the tag team ranks took a big hit.

The WWE has other teams, of course. The Colons are the current champs. There is Cryme Tyme, Priceless/Legacy, and now they re-formed the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Tag Team” in Shelton Benjamin and Charlie Haas. This might look curious, but it makes some sense.

Benjamin has been a singles star for some time. But with two big time heels on SmackDown in Edge and Chris Jericho, and the pushing on Dolph Ziggler to be a third top heel on the show, Benjamin needs this team (right now) just as much as Haas.

While he is one of the best athletes in all of the WWE, Shelton needs more heat from the WWE Universe in order to move on to the World Title picture in my opinion. 

So, re-forming this group will help out the tag team wrestling the WWE lacks and will help them both in the future. Of course, I see them breaking apart in within a year or so.

One group I am really high on is The New Hart Foundation. I believe this is the article that Leroy saw, triggering his question. I don’t think he knew quite how passionate I am about the tag team ranks, and hope my answer didn’t bore him out of his mind!

The NHF tag team has the potential to be great for the WWE in my mind. First off, they have great technical skill in the ring, and secondly, they remind me of the original Hart Foundation.

Tyson Kidd reminds me of Bret Hart and D.H. Smith reminds me not only of his father, the British Bulldog, but of Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, too. They have some inspiration from Neidhart’s daughter, Natalya.

They have all graduated from the Hart Dungeon, too. And the wrestlers who come out of there are usually great; I can’t remember one who wasn’t.

Bret and Jim had singles success; of course Bret had more, becoming a multiple-time World Champion. But they stayed together for many years throughout their careers.

So, they didn’t end the Foundation right off and push them to singles wrestling. Which I hope will not happen here, either.

While both could easily be in singles wrestling, and do well, there is no doubt that they will do well in tag wrestling, too. That is where they could shine for the WWE right now. Being new, they need to get the WWE Universe on their sides.

After seeing ECW this past Tuesday, they look like THE tag team in the WWE right now.

I feel that they have received good advice from the old Hart Foundation. They knew what it took to be a good tag team obviously. So, if they can be anything like the original HF, then we will see one of the best teams in WWE history.

That is the state of tag wrestling to me. I would love for the WWE to utilize tag teams more; they do have potential in some teams on the roster right now. However, currently TNA is on the mountain top when it comes to true tag wrestling.

On to the next question….

Alex Bermejo wants to know, “Will TNA ever be big enough to take on WWE? Maybe even see somewhat of an invasion?”

While we will not see a true “Invasion” as long as TNA is still a company on its own and not bought out by WWE, I feel they can take them on ratings wise one day.

The fact is, TNA has some of the best wrestlers in the world today. I mean right off the top of my head I can think of Christopher Daniels, AJ Styles, and Samoa Joe.

They have THE best tag team wrestling as I have mentioned earlier in the article, too. Also, the WWE got rid of their cruiserweight title. So the X-Division, TNA has lets us see that action we want to see in WWE, but can’t.

WWE has TNA’s number when it comes to marketing, singles wrestling, and overall fan base. Not to mention money, which is always a factor when you are selling a product.

For instance, we can watch TNA on Thursday, but WWE has four other shows throughout the week. None of them are in the same time slot as iMPACT; however, the amount of exposure—four to one—is a formidable mountain to climb.

So while TNA gets many fans to watch, they cannot really feel that they are on anywhere close to equal footing with the WWE until this gap can be closed.

I feel Ric Flair said it best, when said he would rather go to Ring of Honor than TNA, not because he does not respect them; but all they do is talk about beating Vince McMahon and the WWE.

They need to be about themselves than the giant they are trying to beat in my mind. Vince cared what WCW did, but he just did his own thing. Which put him over the top in the end.

Right now, TNA does not have the wrestlers to have more than one show. WWE didn’t have enough until the late 90s themselves. Nor did they have the money to do so until then.

When WWE was starting to put RAW on the air, they were really the only wrestling organization getting that much exposure with a mainstream TV show.

WCW soon did too, but WWE was the first to really get out to the fans.

Then, WWE and WCW started swapping wrestlers. Many of the big time wrestlers in WWE were going to WCW. Of course they took their fans with them, which really helped WCW out tremendously.

TNA is not really doing that. While they do have Booker T, Kurt Angle, Mick Foley, Scott Steiner, and Kevin Nash, all of them are getting up in age. Sting was never in WWE, but he is still not a young guy anymore, either.

While I am a fan of many of these men, they are not going to be around forever. What WCW did was get wrestlers in their prime or when they were really popular in WWE.

Take Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, and others, for example. Hogan had taken time off, but he was already popular from movie spots in addition to his WWE stint.

Savage went to WCW, of course, apparently because of something that went down in WWE. He was really popular and relatively young then, too.

The list goes on and on. This is the type of crossover exposure that WCW was able to get when prime WWE stars defected to WCW, especially when Hogan, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash “invaded” WCW and started the huge “New World Order” faction.

After a while, it seemed that just about every wrestler in WCW joined the nWo.  And it finally got old, but it was really popular at the time.

TNA has something like that in Main Event Mafia, but, it doesn’t seem that it will last very long, considering the ages of the principles involved.

Rumors of Kurt Angle leaving for WWE are not going to help them.

Sting is possibly retiring soon. Nash can’t wrestle that often because of health issues. Steiner is just terrible to begin with. And Booker T is doing his own little thing.

Booker probably has a good three years left in him, while all I mentioned other than Angle could last maybe one to two more if they do not injure themselves further.

TNA does have some young wrestlers, but TNA would rather push the older wrestlers to World Title matches.

Eric Young, Jay Lethal, Samoa Joe, A. J. Styles, Chris Daniels, Suicide/Kaz, and others could be pushed to World Title matches. But TNA has been reluctant to do that.

Joe is very popular with his new gimmick, and that should be taken advantage of by TNA. But it just isn’t. Both Styles and Joe are former TNA World Champions. Shouldn’t this be something TNA pays more attention to?

If they are former World Champions, shouldn’t they at least be in World Title matches more often?

TNA refuses to do that. 

I know Styles has the TNA Legends Title. But, to me he should have never been in the storyline to win it. He should be in the middle of a Kurt Angle storyline again.

Or maybe in another Sting storyline. They have had some of these storylines go on for far too long, and maybe the fans want to see fresh angles.

I, for one, want to see Styles and Sting in a program for the World Title for more than a month, and then end it later on instead of killing off a great storyline fans were getting into. 

Having a guy like Mick Foley as your World Champion is stupid to me, just plain stupid. There is not much more I can say on that, I just hate it.

These are mistakes TNA has to get through.

I have to agree with what Kevin Nash said about it. While they do have a lot of talent, they are a good 2 to 3 years away from taking on WWE.

They could move to Mondays once they are at the level to do so. That will be the true test of how good they are: whether fans will go for the TNA show over RAW.

However, we as a generation have discovered something very good for us. We call It Tivo/DVR.

Depends on what service you have on which one.

They are now counting recordings as a part of ratings, so unlike before with WCW and WWF, TNA would not lose ratings if their show was being taped while a fan is watching RAW live or the other way around. 

So, I feel that they both will be successful. Since TNA is not owned by a multi-millionaire who just wants to own as much as he can, and the owner is more so focused on wrestling. I don’t think they will not be going out of business anytime soon.

So, that is my opinion on your question, Alex. Hope it wasn’t too long for you, either!

Like I said before, you can add your two cents, too. I know other people have their opinions on things. If you want a question answered then just ask here in a comment, on my profile, or e-mail me at: [e-mail]