Last week was a big one with lots of new tv shows airing and shows changing networks, but the one I enjoyed the most wasn’t even on TV at all. One of the best wrestling shows I saw was NWA Power that was available on Youtube.
It was studio wrestling, the same kind of wrestling done back in the 80s. It was even referenced as the show was filmed in Atlanta and there were plenty of references for the history of televised pro wrestling from Atlanta at 6:05 (when the show aired). So there was a lot of nostalgic moments as the action was going on.
This brings up one moment that stood out and not entirely in a good way. NWA Owner William Corgan (William to sound more professional than Billy) ran a video showing things coming together and during the video, he told the wrestling talent straight to their faces that they shouldn’t try to be someone else and that this wasn’t to try and be someone else on the show.
Ummm… The whole point of doing this is to do things like they used to do on the old Crockett show on TBS. You are making it look like someone else’s show from 30 years ago. I think you are missing the point of this.
BUT if that is the worst thing to come out of all this, it still was pretty damn good.
The hour-long show featured the World Champion Nick Aldis in an amazing main event match against Tim Storm in a match with a lot of background, the NWA Tag Champions Royce Isaacs (That I’ve seen from Championship Wrestling from Hollywood) and Thomas Latimer (That I did not recognize formerly as Bram from TNA) were in action as well as National Champion James Storm in a dust-up with Jocephus. The top champions and the people who you should pay attention to were shown and that is the kind of thing you air on the first episode of the new show. This wasn’t some 9 months old pay per view where your current World Champion loses to a guy going to the competition.
This show didn’t hammer a point home to “carry a story” the way the WWE would do, whether you cared about that story or not. The story Tim Storn had about it being his last chance at the title was a simple one that was played out for fans and not beaten over our heads by the announcers. In fact, there had been a lot of rumblings about Jim Cornette being one of the announcers but neither of them took away from the action. You didn’t hear the bickering between them and whatever like you would elsewhere. Despite it being a “throwback” in many ways, you didn’t hear someone screaming that some wrestler was being “vintage” by actually hitting one of their signature moves.
All in all, It was a great performance by the wrestlers and the NWA itself. I hope they carry on like this and I may become a fan of the NWA again, especially now that they won’t book a Cracker Barrel hardcore match or any of the other trademarks of a certain someone telling people who their father was.
