Dixie Carter: Is the TNA President Too Nice or Is She Just Wrong for Wrestling?

Dixie Carter has done great things in TNA.

She has taken a small, dead-on-its-feet promotion that was basically used to showcase the NWA’s best talent and turned it into the second-biggest wrestling company in North America, and she did it in less than 10 years.

The fact is that she has done great things, but now her flaws and lack of knowledge of the wrestling business are shining through, and she is losing supporters left and right.

All this can be traced back to Vince Russo and Dixie’s unexplainable desire to keep him employed when it has become apparent to everyone else that he needs to go.

Most people believe that Dixie is too nice and doesn’t want to fire someone that’s been with the company for so long.

But, if that were the case, then why didn’t she have a problem with wrestlers like Jay Lethal, Petey Williams, and Amazing Red leaving the company?

Carter said in an interview that Vince Russo is exceptionally talented and often used as a scapegoat for other members of the creative team.

She also makes the bold claim that the “fire Russo” chants are always in segments that have been written by someone else.

The whole situation was made even more confusing when Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff joined TNA. Neither of these two men has ever gotten along with Russo, and we are just now seeing the result of years of bad blood and bad attitudes boiling over.

It doesn’t help that the entire locker room is now getting caught up in the Hogan/Bischoff vs. Dixie/Russo fight and that a lot of good talent is now either jumping ship or considering jumping ship.

The fact is that Dixie Carter has no knowledge of what to do from a creative standpoint, and when you judge her from a business standpoint, she hasn’t been that great either.

Numerous money problems, overpaying for old talent, and bad working conditions have become all too common under Dixie’s reign.

Paul Heyman refused to join TNA because Carter was too nice and wasn’t willing to fire the right people. (I think this was the first mentioning of Dixie being too nice for the company’s good.)

But, we have consistently seen that she has no problem in firing young wrestlers, so what really is the problem?

The most likely conclusion (other than Russo blackmailing Dixie) is that Dixie loves polarizing figures in wrestling.

In her interview she briefly mentioned that Russo was a polarizing figure in pro wrestling, and when you look at the recent big-name signings that TNA has made, the fact that they are polarizing characters becomes a main factor when you describe these men.

Hulk Hogan, Eric Bischoff, Orlando Jordan, Mr Anderson, Jeff Hardy, Matt Hardy, Scott Steiner, and even Ric Flair have all become major polarizing figures. Whether it be due to their age (and inability to wrestle consistently), personal problems, bad gimmicks, or inability to reach their full potentials, all these men have been causes of great debate.

I think Dixie Carters “big plan” to upstage the WWE is to fill the roster full of wrestlers that are constantly being debated by fans.

Think about it for a moment: When someone like Scott Steiner beats AJ Styles, there is uproar from the IWC about Russo’s terrible booking and the direction of TNA.

Is Dixie Carter running off the theory that any publicity is good publicity?

I don’t think that Dixie Carter is too nice; I just think she is bringing the wrong game plan to the table and TNA won’t survive another year if she doesn’t smarten up and change it now.