Believe It or Not, Here are Four Reasons Why You Should Watch TNA Wrestlng by Corey Henson

Corey Henson and Troy go back.  Corey once worked at ADV, and he and Troy wrote for Newtype USA together before Corey came over to Shotgun.  Corey was one of the three original Best Shots members with Troy and The Rev. OJ Flow.  And when Troy became Newsarama's Blog@ Captain, Corey was part of that crew too.  His Shotgun rep is deep, and his knowledge of comics, anime and wrestling is large.  Ladies and gentlmen, Corey f'n Henson is back . . .

TNA Wrestling has been the laughing stock of professional wrestling for many years, and not without reason. Frankly, for much of its history, TNA has been completely unwatchable. As a matter of fact, I stopped watching TNA during the summer of 2009, and didn’t miss it for even a second. Recently, I decided to give Impact Wrestling another chance, and I was pleasantly surprised that the show had improved greatly while I wasn’t watching. In fact, I’d say that most weeks, TNA Impact Wrestling is a much better show than WWE Raw. If you’re a wrestling fan who’s been ignoring TNA, here is, in no particular order, a list of reasons why you may want to give the company a chance to make a positive impression.

1. THE RESURRECTION OF STING
TNA has a history of spending way too much time and money on middle-aged, washed-up wrestlers who ultimately do nothing to make positive contributions to TNA. Randy Savage, Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, Hulk Hogan and others have all failed to live up to contracts with more zeroes than a New Jersey night club. At the opposite end of the spectrum there’s Sting, the 52-year old legend who’s turned down numerous opportunities to sign with the WWE for the sake of multiple runs in TNA. Sting’s TNA career hasn’t always been stellar, thanks to a combination of poor booking and Sting’s own diminishing abilities as an athlete. There was also a heel turn in 2008 that was hard to watch because Sting never seemed to fully commit himself to making it work. For the past year, however, Sting has been one of the highlights of TNA. Once again, he’s reinvented his character, swapping the Crow motif he developed in 1996 for a new persona that’s equal parts Frank Gorshin’s Riddler and Heath Ledger’s Joker. It sounds utterly ridiculous on paper, but in reality it’s quite awesome, because Sting is busting his ass to make it work both in and out of the ring. Most of all, he looks like he’s having fun again, and it’s a blast to watch. If these are indeed the waning days of his wrestling career, as it’s been rumored, then he’s definitely going out on a high note.

5 Things That Will Never Go Out of Style in Pro Wrestling by The Russ

5) We love to watch fat guys dancing.

“The Funkasaurus” Brodus Clay

Rikishi… or RA-Kishi, if you’re Jim Ross

Too Cold Scorpio

PN News

One Man Gang/Akeem

Koko B. Ware

unless you’re this guy:

Big Dick Johnson

FINALLY . . . THE RUSS HAS COME BACK TO SHOTGUNREVIEWS.COM!

Top 5 Favorite Shotgun moments

 by Russell Ray

I'm Russ. I used to write pro wrestling articles and was the managing editor for Shotgun for a while. If you want to know more, go bug Troy. He will probably write a blurb about each of us because I am too LAZY to write my own bio.

Anyway, I think I was the third or fourth person who came on board after the site initially launched in '99, and that period to 2002 was probably my favorite time on the site and what I would consider to be my heyday. At the time, I went through 3 jobs that I hated and wrote as much as I could while on the clock just to get through the day. Here are my top 5 favorite memories of that time:

5) Free schwag. Before the internet economy tanked and then the rest of the economy afterwards, people would throw free stuff at us with just the mention of the word "press". It's only recently with the advent of social media and the resurgence of blogs that this has picked back up again, but if Troy was good at two things, they were the best things to be good at: hiding dead bodies and scoring free (fill in the blank).

In the wrestling boom, we got the trifecta: ECW, WCW Monday Nitro, and a WWE house show. The house show was my favorite wrestling experience ever. I would rather watch a house show than Raw/Smackdown.

ECW was... well, it was ECW, and I guess it's one of those things that at least I could say I did it. The Indianapolis house show was cool from a historical standpoint because it was Mike Awesome's last appearance before running off to WCW (the crowd was about to lynch the guy) and Taz came back from WWE for one night to win the ECW Championship.

WCW was where Troy got to hand a business card to the possible next future Mrs. George Clooney, Stacy Keibler. This was when they were doing Nitro Girl auditions all over the country. Who knew that he would pick the one that would become the most famous?  (Troy's Note: Yeah, I was really going out on a limb there . . .)

Also, I got a complete set of the Royal Rumble Anthology 5 years ago... I guess I still owe WWE that review.

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