TNA Wrestling Continues to Build Up a Resume of Neglect

When someone builds up their resume, it's usually to showcase their accomplishments and increase their value.

However, when Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (also known as Impact Wrestling at one point) adds to its resume, it is to add to a history of neglect.  If it were a college athletics program, it would be called "lack of institutional control"—the term that gets programs put on probation.

There is no probation for TNA Wrestling, though—just a failure to learn from mistakes while waiting for the hammer to drop.

As with most companies, TNA has problems that start from the top with its world champion Kurt Angle.

Angle was arrested earlier this month for DWI after being stopped by police after a TNA Wrestling house show.  This after pleading guilty to "being in control of a motor vehicle while intoxicated" after being stopped by police in North Dakota after a TNA show back in April.

Angle also had a DUI charge in 2007, but was cleared.

Many professional athletes and coaches have had to seek employment with new teams (such as Tank Johnson being released from the Chicago Bears in 2007) when they had a DUI, much less two in a matter of months. 

This wasn't the case with Kurt Angle, who not only wasn't punished for either DUI charge, but retained the world title at the September Pay-Per-View, No Surrender.  In Angle's defense, he is challenging the charge.

Unfortunately, having talent perform at PPVs when they shouldn't is nothing new for TNA.

September also marked the return of TNA wrestler Jeff Hardy—his first appearance since the March PPV, Victory Road, when he was too inebriated to have a match.  Of course, in TNA fashion, instead of stopping him from wrestling, they had Hardy come out for the main event world title match against champion Sting. He was pinned in a couple of minutes.

This was an embarrassment for Hardy, the company and the creative staff, who couldn't come up with a better alternative than to have a five-minute main event (with entrances) for their PPV.

Hardy returned earlier this month—appearing on the episode of Impact that aired on the same day he pled guilty in a North Carolina court to drug charges for an arrest in September 2009 (prior to signing with TNA) where police found Hardy with Vicodin pills, anabolic steroids and powder cocaine.

The lack of accountability by TNA for its talent has given the company a less-than-stellar reputation by wrestling critics, but the company has, luckily, avoided anything worse.

Still, TNA continues to play its own version of Russian Roulette by failing to take significant action on its talent when those wrestlers fall into legal trouble and instead hope that the big tragedy that does them in never comes.

While they have not had tragedies like the deaths of Owen Hart, Brian Pillman and Eddie Guerrero on their watch like World Wrestling Entertainment has had (much less the horror of something like the Chris Benoit murder/suicide), the handling of situations makes you think it is not a matter of "if" but of "when."

So far, the actions of TNA towards its talent have been covered strictly by wrestling media sites, while the actual acts of talent like Angle, Hardy and Hardy's brother Matt (who TNA actually did take action with, firing him after a series of DUI offenses, being late for shows and posting a number of embarrassing YouTube videos) have been picked up by the Associated Press and TMZ.

It makes you wonder what will happen if/when one of those tragedies occur on TNA's watch.  It has shown a willingness to allow a wrestler to go in the ring for the main event of a PPV when that wrestler is in no condition to do so with Jeff Hardy.

Hardy was also rumored to have been in questionable shape during TNA's December 2010 PPV, Final Resolution, and almost pulled off the show. Hardy was also rumored to be inebriated when he gave TNA wrestler Ken Anderson a chair shot on an episode of Impact in November 2010 that busted the back of Anderson's head open and gave him a legitimate concussion.

TNA also had a match with Sting vs. 62-year-old wrestling legend Ric Flair on their Impact television show earlier in September.  Flair has a history with a disease known as alcoholic cardiomyopathy, in which the chronic long-term abuse of alcohol leads to heart failure.

Flair, who admitted he had the disease in his 2004 autobiography, To Be the Man, has denied still being afflicted with the disease after it was reported in a recent article on ESPN.com's Grantland site.

Still, is a man with that condition, or a man like Jeff Hardy or Kurt Angle, who has a long history of concussions and neck injuries, the kind of person you risk putting in the ring—much less the main event of your PPVs or television show?

One day, TNA's luck will run out and a serious tragedy will befall them. 

That will bring out more than just the wrestling media sites, but major media and journalists who will uncover a long resume of neglect by the company that includes what is listed here and even more, including an ongoing workers compensation case against them filed by former women's talent Daffney.

When that happens, it will affect not only TNA and it's parent company, Panda Energy, but it will also taint those associated with the company that failed to do anything.

That includes: cable TV network partner Spike TV and its parent company Viacom; executive producer Eric Bischoff and his successful production company, Bischoff-Hervey Entertainment; and the company's biggest name, Hulk Hogan, and the Hulk Hogan brand that he has worked hard to build with such current projects as the television show, Hulk Hogan's Micro Championship Wrestling, and the upcoming video game Hulk Hogan's Main Event.

Fingers will be pointed and those entities, along with Panda Energy, will likely all be taking an "every man for themselves" mentality. 

(***Spoiler alert: For those who don't want to be spoiled on upcoming Impact television shows, please skip the following two paragraphs).

There is already speculation that has started with talk of both Bischoff and Hogan leaving TNA when their contracts wrap up later this year.  This talk grew at the recent Impact taping when the heel Hulk Hogan came out and announced he'd be making a retirement announcement at the upcoming Impact taping in Knoxville, Tenn. He then put over baby faces such as AJ Styles and Bobby Roode.

It could be the usual swerve by TNA Head of Creative Vince Russo, but it could also be a case of Hogan and Bischoff seeing the writing on the wall and getting out while the getting is good.

(***End of spoilers) 

When this happens, the losers will not be these big money forces, but rather the wrestlers, who will lose a place to work and wrestling fans who will lose an opportunity to watch some of these talents perform.

Hopefully, smarter and cooler heads will prevail and steps will be taken by the people in management at TNA Wrestling to turn this disturbing trend around.

Until then, TNA's resume of neglect continues to grow.