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| Austin Aries, new TNA Champ Photo courtesy: Impact Wrestling |
@NGPDrew on Twitter
TNA is never going to be the
WWE.
For most of its history, TNA has been a company operating in
ignorance of this fact; they’ve aimed their content at the same audience, tried
directly competing with the WWE and its flagship program, and, in a move that
is inarguably the most notorious of all, hired a consortium of wrestlers that
were either well past their prime or were from an entirely different era
altogether. Last night at
Destination X, the company’s latest pay-per-view event that annually aims its
glance at the roster’s brightest young superstars, TNA fell victim to none of
these expected tropes and instead shifted its focus elsewhere: inward.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never much cared
for TNA; if a company can’t envision itself as anything better than a
generic-brand clone of its top competitor, then, in my eyes, why should I
picture it any other way? Last
night, though, I couldn’t tear myself away from what was suddenly a unique
interpretation of the medium that couldn’t be seen anywhere else.
Destination X was not aimed at the middle of the
demographic, didn’t offer itself up as direct competition to the WWE and its
brand of wrestling, and the only superstar in the spotlight that was past their
prime was Kurt Angle, a grappler who, even after years of wear and tear
suffered in the ring, is still better than most on his worst day. Destination X was instead aimed at
crafting a new image of the company that wasn’t a replica of anything else on
the market, and, in that vain, it was a rousing success.
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| Rubix gets some air Photo courtesy: Impact Wrestling |
The event wasn’t perfect by any means thanks to a few
hiccups in storytelling and a few matches that felt like ho-hum filler used
only to best utilize the three-hour timeslot, but it was an unquantifiable
amount of steps in the right direction for a promotion that has spent much of
its life walking backwards. TNA
successfully highlighted a burgeoning focus on the independent scene’s most
talented members and did so in a way that was unlike the WWE or any other
federation across the globe.
At Destination X, TNA defied expectations and became what it
was always meant to be: TNA, a
brand defined not by its competition but by its own vision of how wrestling
should be.
