If you haven't heard the news, Samoa Joe defeated Kurt Angle Sunday night at TNA's Lockdown pay per view to win the TNA world title. I didn't catch the whole show, but I've since seen some snippets of it on Youtube. I thought I'd share a few observations. Feel free to share your own.
. I'm thrilled for Samoa Joe winning his first "world title" and think it's a wise move for TNA, although I would have wished that the title change would have received more hype, and taken place on a bigger show that TNA's annual clustermess, "Lockdown" - which, by featuring all cage matches, severely lessens the significance of the stipulation. Nonetheless, TNA should be commended for putting their top title on a "TNA original" (even though that's pretty disputable, as well) rather than another WWE/WCW castoff.
(Photo credit: TNAWrestling.com)
. What exactly should qualify as a "world title"? Historically, that designation has been made by Pro Wrestling Illustrated, which did officially designate TNA's top title as such. But it can be a slippery slope. The only recognized world title with any real history right now is the WWE's Raw brand's world title, which has a lineage going back to the first WWWF champion Buddy Rogers. Smackdown's "world heavyweight title" was created and awarded to Triple H less than six years ago. TNA could claim more legitimacy to its world title when it featured the NWA championship. The current version has less than a year of history behind it - but I think TNA has made enough of an impact (no pun intended) to warrant world title status. I don't think even WWE is trying to pass off the ECW title as a world championsip anymore. Heck, they even had then-ECW champ Chavo Guerrero compete in the 30-man Royal Rumble for a shot at a "real" world title. Incidentally, while PWI does not consider the current ECW championship as a world title, it did grant that distinction to the much smaller late 1990's version. What about ROH? While still only a blip on the radar of the national wrestling audience, its title has been defended in England and Japan, and among wrestling purists, has more respect than most other championsips.
. A lot of people - myself included - were skeptical about Joe and Angle's match being billed as a "mixed martial arts style" bout. From what I've seen of the match, I think it's safe to say that a lot of us were proven wrong. The two wrestlers found very innovative ways to incorporate several MMA-inspired moves, while never straying too far from the fundamentals of a worked pro wrestling match. The Undertaker has long been advancing pro wrestling as an artform with his work, and Angle and Joe just took that another step with their match.
. I hated Joe's promise to retire from wrestling all together if he lost the match. Since there's no way Joe was about to quit the business, the stipulation would either pointlessly give away the finish of the match, or have fans dreading how TNA would somehow back out of delivering on Joe's promise. Neither scenario was good. If they wanted to make the stakes higher, they could have said that Joe would not get another title shot against Angle, or would shave his head, or something else more realistic. As is par for the course with TNA, they made the stipulations of the match unnecessarily convoluted.
Comments (6)
I am really happy Samoa Joe finally won the title, but I not totally happy because he should have won it a year a ago, and he lost too many times for my taste.
"As is par for the course with TNA, they made the stipulations of the match unnecessarily convoluted."
You took the words right out of my mouth, Seth.
Typical booking from TNA. "Only a cage, you say? With the World Title on the line? Not enough ballyhoo."
Typical booking from TNA. "Only a cage, you say? With the World Title on the line? Not enough ballyhoo."
Joe's title reign is long overdue. He should have won at Bound for Glory last year instead of Sting. On the flipside, it made us (the audience) want him to win even more on Sunday. I do agree the stipulation was dumb, nonetheless, I think we all got we want.
What stipulations were there? TNA never once said the match was being contested under "MMA rules" and even if they had, I had no clue that MMA fights were won via pin fall.