10 Impact Wrestling decisions that they still regret

Impact Wrestling has a long and uneven history. The brand launched after WWE bought out WCW, and after Jeff Jarrett, in particular, could see that there would be no place for him in the company. So, he worked with his father on starting his own wrestling company.

Jarrett purportedly decided on the acronym TNA before he decided what it was would actually stand for, in the interest of being provocative. The initials may have garnered attention in the early going, but have also made it difficult for the company to be taken seriously by some fans, and has since had a certain stigma around it.

Nonetheless, the company has persevered. What was once a show based on a weekly PPV model transitioned to a more traditional national promotion with weekly TV and monthly-or-so PPVs, to today’s schedule which still appears to be in flux. The company has seen people like Vince Russo, Hulk Hogan, Eric Bischoff, Billy Corgan, and Dixie Carter rotate through different kinds and levels of power. More than once, rumours of its demise have come up. Fifteen years have passed, however, and the promotion has remained in one form another.

Impact has its critics, and even its most fervent supporters have to admit that the company has made some questionable choices over time. This article looks at ten decisions they still regret.

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#10 AJ Styles’s last Main Event push

Impact's usage of AJ Styles was poorly planned at the end of his run.

The Aces and Eights storyline had its ups and downs, but one piece that seemed to be working well enough was casting AJ Styles as a modern-day reimagining of Sting’s Crow gimmick.

Like Sting had been for WCW, Styles was the loyal TNA favourite, and like Sting with the New World Order, Styles' friends were suspicious he was joining Aces and Eights. So Styles became a lone wolf with no alliances at all. While he may not have had Sting’s mystique, he did keep up his wrestling schedule and was still in his prime, such that he was more than ready to claim the world championship when his story came to a climax.

Things grew convoluted, however, when the news broke that Styles’s contract was up with Impact Wrestling, and the two sides struggled to reach a deal. In a strange, but still arguably compelling choice, Styles was recast as more of a CM Punk circa-2011 character, who may or may not walk out with his company’s world title.

The change in the direction diluted a strong story for the "Phenomenal One". Even worse, after so much of the company’s programming was centred around Styles for months, the contract situation actually wasn’t resolved and he wound up walking out just a couple months later.

#9 Ruining Samoa Joe’s first World Title reign

Impact squandered a star in Samoa Joe.

Samoa Joe had cut his teeth on the indie circuit before coming to Impact Wrestling but nonetheless felt like a homegrown talent for not having risen to fame in WWE or WCW first. The company cultivated a feel-good story when, after nearly three years of getting over and performing at the highest level, Joe defeated Kurt Angle to win the company’s world title.

Joe had a reasonable reign, as the first champion to retain the TNA Championship in a King of the Mountain Match, and staving off challenges from more established stars like Booker T and Scott Steiner. The truest test, however, would come at Bound for Glory. TNA branded this show as their WrestleMania, and Joe would face WCW legend Sting. Sting had won the main events of the preceding two Bound for Glory shows over Jeff Jarrett and Kurt Angle. As Sting inched further and further from his prime, it would only be natural to put Joe over Sting to shore up his status as the company’s top player.

Sting won the match, however. He not only won but won on account of a predictable swerve when Kevin Nash hit Joe with a baseball bat. The angle reeked of a swerve for a swerve’s sake, and one could fairly argue that Joe never regained the momentum that he had established in the early stages of his first TNA Championship reign.

#8 Squandering young CM Punk

Impact wasted the opportunity to capitalize on CM Punk's potential.

Watch some early episodes of TNA and you’ll see the forgotten run of CM Punk there, primarily playing a sidekick for Raven. Punk accomplished nothing of note with the promotion, before leaving under a wave of controversy. Various reports attribute the falling out to Punk having an altercation with Teddy Hart, to management feeling Punk wasn’t getting over, and to contractual disputes about Punk’s ability to work with ROH concurrently.

When you look at what Punk would become for both ROH and WWE as a legit, breakout, main event star, it’s wild to think that TNA had a real chance to have done the same and blew it. The misuse of the "Straight Edge Superstar" supports the popular theory that TNA never really knew how to grow its own talent, and was too dependent on imports from other big companies (mostly WWE and WCW). To be fair, Punk has a reputation for being difficult to work with, but you have to wonder what might have been, had TNA decided to give Punk a real push, back in 2003.

#7 Brooke Hogan as an authority figure

Brooke Hogan had no business in an on-air authority role.

In 2009, Hulk Hogan came on board with Impact Wrestling as both a behind the scenes power breaker and on-air personality. You can debate whether that, in and of itself was a bad decision. Hogan was still arguably the most famous wrestling personality in the world, so it’s understandable why the company would gamble on signing him. It’s debatable whether the results were just disappointing, or outright catastrophic to the company.

There’s very little debating over the choice to position Hogan’s daughter, Brooke, as the on-air authority figure over the Knockouts (women’s) division. Brooke had literally no credentials for the role besides being her father’s daughter. She’d never wrestled herself, had no business credentials and wasn’t even a good talker to justify becoming a mouthpiece for the division.

While the merits of Hulk’s work with the company are subject to opinion, there’s really no argument at all that it was a good decision to position Brooke this way. It’s a move that actively detracted from a once successful part of the Impact Wrestling product, and that the company mercifully put to an end after a few painful months.

#6 D-Von Dudley as the first member of Aces and Eights

D-Von Dudley was not the mystery man Impact wanted for the main event angle.

The Aces and Eights storyline was reasonable enough stab at reigniting the heel super stable angle that Impact Wrestling has turned to a number of times over the year. The angle featured the intrigue of all of the group members being masked and launching stiff assaults on Impact Wrestling talent to introduce themselves to the audience.

There would come a time, however, when the group members needed to take the masks off, and that’s where the storyline began to fall flat. The first man revealed? None other than D-Von Dudley.

D-Von is a very skilled professional wrestler with a great tag team wrestling resume. Additionally, there was some merit to the reveal, in that his longtime partner Bully Ray had been getting a big face push against Aces and Eights. Even from a creative perspective, D-Von would end up making sense in this spot when the big swerve came in—that Bully Ray was actually leading the heel faction behind the scenes all along.

In the immediate moment, however, this was a completely flat reveal. The main event super stable’s first member turned out to be a tag wrestler who was past his prime and had never been meaningfully pushed as a singles star before. This tantamount to the New World Order’s infamous third man turning out to be Alex Wright, or if The Higher Power behind the Ministry of Darkness had been The Brooklyn Brawler. The surprise reveal immediately robbed the angle of some of its heat.

#5 The public feud over the Broken universe

The Broken Universe went from the hottest act in Impact, to a reason to hate the company.

2016 saw Matt Hardy engage in one of the most dramatic career reinventions pro wresting has ever seen. He launched the Broken Universe, through which he claimed to be possessed by a much older soul. The angle gave way to a wildly imaginative series of vignettes and oddball matches staged at the Hardy Compound (Hardy’s real-life home).

For a brief period, the gimmick was so compelling that it overtook Impact Wrestling, leading to a full special TV episode being filmed at the compound, with so much of the active roster sucked into that oddball world.

However, hings took a turn after a change in management. The company’s new leadership was neither as invested in Hardy’s creative vision, nor willing to broker a deal for a new contract in what Hardy considered a reasonable timeframe. While not everyone loved the 'Broken' gimmick, it had a ton of buzz around it and allowed Matt and his brother Jeff to become the hottest free agents in independent wrestling en route to a WWE return.

Impact Wrestling management, however, claimed intellectual property rights over the Broken Universe. While the Hardys could tease bits of their old gimmick, they couldn’t refer to themselves as Broken outright while the matter was tied up in legal proceedings. The issue gave way to a bitter war of words over social media that largely made Impact look bad, both for letting the Hardys go to cut off the fun angle and for keeping it from continuing elsewhere.

Impact more recently let the matter go, giving the Hardys their blessing to take back the gimmick, and ensuring more liberties for wrestlers to take their gimmicks with them in the future. It’s a nice gesture but doesn’t erase a half year of publicly looking like obstructionist bullies, effectively chasing away fans the Broken Universe had won them.

#4 The GFW branding

The GFW brand brought a new level of confusion to Impact.

One of the bigger wrestling business stories of 2017 was that TNA and the project Jeff Jarrett had founded since leaving the company—Global Force Wrestling—were coming together under the same umbrella of ownership. It was a bit confusing, particularly from a kayfabe perspective, as the rosters came together, and yet didn’t initially make any moves toward unifying titles. On the contrary, GFW even crowned new champions for vacant titles after joining forces.

The popular theory was that there would be big brand war—contrived as it may have been—culminating everything getting rebranded under the GFW brand. It was a sensible enough objective, centred on the dubious reputation and stigmas TNA had developed in the preceding years.

However, before it was all said and done, news broke that Jeff Jarrett was going on leave, followed by reports of his erratic behaviour and that he was entering the WWE sponsored rehab program. Suddenly, the GFW branding fell away, in time for the biggest show of the year, Bound for Glory, being marketed as an Impact Wrestling event.

The whole ordeal added an additional layer of confusion, and a sense the organization didn’t know what it was doing.

#3 The new Monday Night War

The new Monday Night War was more of a massacre.

In 2010, the Impact television show made a move from its traditional placement on Thursday nights over to Mondays, directly opposite WWE’s Monday Night Raw. The move toward competition wasn’t incidental, as executive Dixie Carter went so far as to actively Tweet about a new Monday Night War, referencing the previous competition between WWE and WCW.

TNA did have some new players under contract including Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff in advisory roles (besides appearing as on-screen authorities). There was also a combination of new signees or former talents brought back, including Ric Flair, Jeff Hardy, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Sean Waltman, and Orlando Jordan. There was some sense of TNA thinking it could compete.

WWE utterly dominated this ratings “war,” though, with Impact never garnering even half of Raw’s viewership. The larger company was particularly deft in programming the return of Bret Hart opposite Impact’s maiden Monday broadcast. After losing viewers and money, Impact would retreat back to later in the weak, with no real benefits to show from this effort.

#2 Sending Jeff Hardy to the ring impaired

Letting Jeff Hardy work in an impaired state was a huge mistake.

The Victory Road 2011 main event was a disaster. Sting defended the world title against Jeff Hardy, only Hardy came to the ring legitimately impaired by substance use. So, after a slow minute or so, Sting abruptly forced him into a pinning position for the win. The match was an embarrassment for everyone involved.

Fans chanted expletives, and Sting yelled back that he agreed. In an attempt to make good, the company offered PPV buyers free access to their on-demand service. While it was a reasonable gesture, the offer did little to quell discontented fans or erase the memory of this ugly occurrence.

According to reports at the time, Hardy did not seem dangerously impaired until moments before he came to the ring. This seems at odds with Hardy’s state when he did actually get in front of cameras, and it portrayed the company in an awful light that they’d send someone who seemed at all impaired out to the ring, let alone to work such a high profile match.

#1 The Reverse Battle Royal

The reverse battle royal concept was doomed from the start.

There was a period when TNA was desperate to innovate. 2006 saw the introduction of the three-stage Fight for the Right Tournament for a world title shot.

One of the cardinal rules of booking a gimmick match in wrestling is to keep the rules simple enough for fans to follow. TNA had a history of walking the line on this idea. For example, they booked King of the Mountain matches that were by and large good. The matches also featured convoluted enough rules surrounding penalty boxes and ladder match variations that they were difficult for fans—especially new ones who hadn’t seen the match before—to wrap their heads around.

Fight for the Right included a battle royal, a single-elimination tournament that culminated in a Triple Threat, and a match between the battle royal winner and the tournament victory. All of this, on its own, was probably too complicated. You can then add in the most counter-intuitive part of all.

The tournament opened with a Reverse Battle Royal—a match in which performers started on the floor and battled to get into the ring to qualify for the battle royal to follow. The match-type was completely counterintuitive to what wrestling fans were used to. Furthermore, it was logically problematic, because getting into the ring simply shouldn’t have been that hard, and it felt contrived for the first stage to be such a battle, as opposed to a foot race to get in the ring.