TNA One Night Only: Knockouts Knockdown

TNA One Night Only: Knockouts Knockdown (Taped 3/17/2013- aired 9/6/2013)- Orlando, FL

OPENING VIDEO PACKAGE- mostly good. They did a good job of capitalizing off of the hype from Gail Kim vs. Taryn Terrell at Slammiversary 2013. It got the tone across very well and made the show seem exciting, but I definitely had some semi-nit-picky problems.
1. Apparently this show will be �"a tournament like no other.” What? A bunch of singles matches with the winners entered in a battle royale? That’s been done to death. Same with a women’s tournament. So what is different about this?
2. Of all of the clips of Tara that they could have chosen, they chose a clip of her pointing to Jesse Godderz and saying �"Mr. Pectacular.” REALLY?! Why not choose a clip that… I don’t know… hypes HER up. You know... because SHE is the one wrestling on this show!
3. Advertising this show as having �"the drama you never expected” was pretty stupid because it implies that no one would think that women’s wrestling is particularly dramatic. Why crap on the product?

OPENING SEGMENT- To open the show, all of the Knockouts come out from backstage to completely generic music while the PandaTron just says "Knockouts" on it. This made them all look like generic interchangeable chumps. Then Brooke Hogan comes out, and Brooke, of course, gets her own entrance music and music video because she is apparently supposed to be a bigger star than the wrestlers. Brooke then says �" I am so happy and so excited to present the first time ever event that spotlights this beautiful Knockouts Division.”
At this point I would like to point out that, of this �"Knockouts Division” standing in the ring at the time that this was taped, only ten of the nineteen women in the ring were under contract to TNA, and of those ten, one was only a referee and three were under developmental deals and thus really not part of the division yet. So the Knockouts Division was so small that in order to to put together a respectable-sized tournament to determine who was �"the best of the best in the Knockouts Division,” they had to bring in so many people that almost two thirds third of the field wasn’t actually part of the Knockouts Division.

I’m also getting annoyed each time I hear them talk about how rare or unique or �"first-time-ever” it is that they are doing an all-women’s show. We are three and a half minutes in and they have said it at least five times already.

Brooke then explains that tonight will be one-night tournament (which is good, because if they only gave me the beginning of a tournament, I’d be super-pissed) and �"each woman will have a match, and the winners of those matches will have a match and the last two women left standing will duke it out to determine who is truly the queen of the Knockouts.”
Now I’m confused. So will there be three rounds or just two? And how are they going to have a match that has two winners in this maybe-happening middle round?

Rather than sort out my confusion, Tenay puts over Brooke’s hum-drum rundown of tonight’s events as �"inspirational.”
As I would find out later, the second round is going to be a battle royale of all of the winners until they get down to two women, and those two will have a normal match. THIS SHOW WAS TAPED MONTHS IN ADVANCE! There is no excuse for not having Brooke re-shoot the damn promo and actually explain what was going to happen!

They then show us the entire final match of the Gauntlet to crowd the first ever Knockouts Champion back at Bound For Glory 2007. Then they show us an additional minute of Gail celebrating with the title while Mike Tenay assures us that �"TNA did it right” by waiting as long as they did before starting a women’s division.

SOCAL VAL INTERVIEWS GAIL KIM- Gail says she is going to win. Madison Rayne shows up and says that she wants Gail to win, too.

GAIL KIM vs. ALYSSA FLASH- 5.5/10
Before the match they took about thirty seconds to give us a nice little video package of Alyssa Flash to remind everyone who she is. A good idea, but the execution was extremely poor. Why? Because they showed us about nineteen shots of her walking down the ramp and unzipping her jacket, but only three shots of her actually wrestling… and all three were the same thing (giving Traci a shoulderbreaker) but from different angles.
As she comes down to the ring, rather than talk about her past matches or her dangerous finisher, Taz claims that her change in hair color was because he once told her he thought she’d look better as a strawberry blonde. I’m certain that if that conversation happened in real life, it would end in Taz getting an ass-kicking.
It’s entirely possible that the reason they don’t talk about her finisher is that they haven’t done their homework at all, because �"Professor” Tenay can’t identify a Kondo Clutch when he sees one. He also fails to identify the Curb Stomp. Those moves are Cheerleader Melissa 101.
Tenay helpfully informs us that Flash was given the nickname �"future legend” after earning the Future Legend Award from the Cauliflower Alley Club. He never explains what the Cauliflower Alley Club is, though, and thus I’m sure casual fans were wondering what vegetables have to do with pro wrestling.
This was the match I was most looking forward to (and I think many others felt this way, too), and TNA gave it less than nine minutes.

VIDEO PACKAGES FOR IVELISSE AND LEI’D TAPA- these were the same exact ones they had from Gut Check. I know this because they left the Gut Check logo in the corner. They really should have put together new video packages for these two. In Tapa’s case it would be nice to see that this new developmental talent has been improving in OVW, but more importantly: this PPV aired in September. TNA was planning on introducing Tapa to the main roster as a monster heel in a few short weeks... so why would you air a video package of your new monster CRYING?
In Ivelisse’s case, it is pretty stupid to have her say �"when my mom sees me on the TNA Gut Check she is going to be so happy” when that Gut Check match aired over half a year before this! They didn’t even bother editing out the �"up next on Impact Wrestling” graphic or cutting the five seconds of the Gut Check logo flashing at the end of this! It’s just lazy, and it shows the fans that you really don’t care about the product you are putting on… but more on that later.

LEI’D TAPA vs. IVELISSE VELEZ- 5.25/10
Very good for the time it was given. Ivelisse looked great. Tapa looked a lot better than she did in her Gut Check match. Ivelisse actually had the people chanting for her. Why the hell did TNA not sign her?

VIDEO OF JESSIE GODDERZ’S DEBUT IN TNA- A pointless, idiotic, counter-productive waste of time.
This is a show about the Knockouts, so of course TNA decides to show a video package of a W-list celebrity being introduced as one of their on-screen boyfriends. To make matters worse, this clip actually started with the last thirty seconds or so of the Knockouts Title match from Bound for Glory 2012, when Tara won the title, and this was not even mentioned in the introduction to this clip. In other words, the fact that one of these women is kayfabe dating someone who barely qualifying as a celebrity is much more important than the championship that all of the women we are seeing here tonight are fighting for. And to make matters worse, they didn’t even bother to edit out the crowd chanting �"WHO ARE YOU?!” at this supposed celebrity.

JB INTERVIEWS TARA & JESSIE- Tara tells us about how she introduced Jessie to the crowd at Bound For Glory 2012… you know… that thing we just saw in the video package. Tara and Jessie totally bury Mia Yim by saying that they don’t even know who she is. Yeah. That definitely makes me excited to see this girl.

MIA YIM PROMO- five seconds. Five f*cking seconds. That’s all they gave her, and that was all the time she needed to cut the best promo we have seen so far on this show (and that includes the long two-minute Gut Check video packages for Tapa and Ivelisse).

MIA YIM vs. TARA (w/Jessie Godderz)- 2.25/10
Taz and Tenay kept beating in the point that Tara had a lot more experience than Mia Yim. Tara is also the one under TNA contract… and yet she needs help from Jessie to get the win. The match wasn’t very good. Yim looked good, but a few of the spots felt completely disjointed. Tara repeatedly shouted at Mia to �"go back to the indies.” Ironically, by the time this show aired, that’s exactly where Tara herself would be.

Next we got one minute of Christy Hemme talking about something called �"Dare to Be” while sexy pictures of the Knockouts played on the screen. At the end of this, we learned that �"Dare to Be” is the name of the new Knockouts website. Why? What are they daring to be? We then got a further FOUR MINUTES of just sexy pictures of the Knockouts while crappy music played in the background. So I guess �"Dare to Be” is short for �"Dare to Be Nothing but a Sexual Object” because it appears that the only thing this new Knockouts website has is sexy pictures.
So they wasted FIVE WHOLE MINUTES advertising a �"new” website that was actually several months old by the time the PPV aired and DOES NOTHING TO HELP ANYONE IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER!

With no introduction whatsoever, we then cut to a clip of Tessmacher rolling Gail up to win the Knockouts Title at Slammiversary 2012. This clip was two minutes long, but only about twenty-five seconds of it was actual wrestling. Instead they decided to air Tessmacher’s promo from after she won the title, which was one of those promos that really isn’t coherent because she was so deliriously happy at her victory… which is fine for when it happens, but not something you really ever want to see again.
So the introduction of a barely-even-qualifies-as-a-celebrity boyfriend is important enough to get an introduction, but someone winning the Knockouts Title is not.

MISS TESSMACHER vs. SANTANA-1.5/10
Like Mia Yim, Santana got about five seconds to tell us about herself. Her promo was okay, and she looked okay in the ring. The match got no time and Tessmacher got almost no offense in before just pinning Santana.

ODB PROMO- great! She put her opponent over as being tough, but said that she was tougher.

VIDEO OF EY & ODB’S WEDDING- NOW I’M F*CKING ANGRY!
TNA decided to show this segment almost in its entirety. They wasted OVER FOURTEEN MINUTES OF PAY-PER-VIEW TIME to show us a segment that was stupid and boring when it happened a year and a half ago, and is only more idiotic and irrelevant here!
FOURTEEN MINUTES. If you added up the three shortest matches on this show, they were just a bit longer than this one waste of time. Ostensibly the purpose of this was to hype up ODB (it certainly wasn’t to entertain anyone because anyone who found this segment entertaining must be too severely mentally damaged to operate a remote)… so they showed a FOURTEEN MINUTE SEGMENT of ODB acting like a goofball (where ODB really wasn’t even the main focus) in order to hype up a match that they only gave six minutes to.
If anyone bought this show expecting to see women’s wrestling, TNA deciding to WASTE FOURTEEN MINUTES with this pointless, recycled horse sh*t has pretty much guaranteed that they will never buy another One Night Only Show again. And people wonder how it is that TNA is going down the f*cking tubes!

At this point in the show, there has actually been more time spent on video packages than on in-ring action.

ODB vs. TRINITY- 0.75/10
Trinity was given no video package at all to introduce herself. I guess everyone is just supposed to remember a background character from the early days of TNA.
Tenay makes a comment to Taz about Trinity’s �"New York attitude.” Taz takes great offense to this, referring to it as a �"slur” (he actually said �"racial slur” at first, but even Taz is smart enough to realize that New Yorker is not a race, so he retracted the �"racial” part). Any New Yorker who would interpret the term �"New York attitude” as a slur is not really a New Yorker.

RECYCLED VIDEO PACKAGE FROM GAIL VS. TARYN- why show two minutes of a video package when 85% of it isn’t relevant?
After this we got a good thirty second video package and interview with Taryn about her match at Slammiversary.

JACKIE MOORE vs. TARYN TERRELL- 2.5/10
Of course, after that great video package putting Taryn over, she gets jobbed out to someone who isn’t even on the roster. Way to go, TNA!
Jackie also got no video package or anything to hype her up, despite having worked in TNA for a long time.

BRITISH BOOTCAMP VIDEO PACKAGE- right. Just to hype up Hannah Blossom, they show their general video package with Hulk Hogan hyping up British Bootcamp, then show Dixie offering both Blossoms contracts and the Blossoms talking about how great it was to wrestle in their home country. All old footage and barely relevant. All this footage did is make me wonder why I should care about Hannah Blossom when you are hyping her up by talking about a competition that she lost, and then made me wonder why Hannah is here but not Holly. Would it really have been so hard to made a f*cking video package of Hannah’s work in OVW?

JB INTERVIEWS HANNAH BLOSSOM- they talk about Holly not being there. She says it will motivate her more. This did nothing to make me care about her.

SOJO BOLT PROMO- F*CKING AWESOME!
When the hell did she learn to cut promos?

SOJO BOLT vs. HANNAH BLOSSOM vs. TAELER HENDRIX- 3.25/10
Taeler Hendrix didn’t get a video package to introduce her, so at least they showed some discretion and didn’t show the Gut Check video package for her in which they talk about her being �"diagnosed with cancer” and how terrible that was, but never mention that it was a false positive and was quickly corrected.

Ah! So apparently the kayfabe reason that only Hannah Blossom is here is because Tenay asked for just one Blossom so that Taz wouldn’t get confused. In other words, Tenay robbed a deserving young woman of a major opportunity because he thinks it would be a travesty for his broadcast partner not to be able to tell identical twins apart from fifty feet away. What an asshole!
The two American heels agree to team up on the one British babyface… so the crowd starts chanting �"USA!” Hooray for xenophobia!
They told their story extremely well in the very little time they were given. Both SoJo and Taeler were awesome heels. Hannah was kind of dull.

RANDOM KNOCKOUTS VIDEO PACKAGE- GREAT!
Why couldn’t they have worked this hard to make some new decent video packages for every other match?

VELVET SKY vs. JILLIAN HALL- 2.25/10
Jillian did a bit of singing before the match. That was fun. After that they just kind of did stuff.

Tenay tells us that we are now going to �"review the story of Mickie James in TNA.” Apparently this means we are going to watch a video of her winning the Knockouts Title for the first time.

MICKIE JAMES vs. SERENA- 5.75/10
Serena gets no video package to introduce herself. Taz says that this is the first time she has ever been out in front of a large audience. Never mind her time in WWE, but I’m fairly certain that most of her ROH appearances have had bigger crowds than TNA draws to the Impact Zone (I know that Final Battle 2010 did for sure, but I’d bet that Honor Takes Center Stage: Chapter 1 and Fifth Year Festival: Chicago did, too). Tenay did not bother to correct Taz’s statement, but later on just randomly threw out there that she has been �"at ringside for some of the biggest names in the business.”
They told a good story here with the mutual respect in the beginning and some nice technical wrestling giving way to Serena getting frustrated and the match turning into more of brawl.


RECAP OF ALL OF THE MATCHES SO FAR- pointless. And you don’t need to show us clips of the f*cking entrances.

What was even the purpose of doing this battle royale to determine the �"queen of the Knockouts” and the �"best of the best in the Knockouts Division?” Isn’t that what the TNA Knockouts Title is for?

GAUNTLET MATCH TO DETERMINE THE �"QUEEN OF THE KNOCKOUTS”- 5.25/10
By this point I was so sick of Taz and Tenay’s sh*tty commentary that I actually muted them.
They did a good job of making Tapa look like a monster. I’m pretty sure both of Mickie’s feet hit the ground during Tapa’s elimination, but Mickie jumped back in quickly and they ignored it.
They did more stuff until it came down to the final two, where, in a swerve that everyone saw coming, Gail faked an injury to get the win. So even on a show with no consequences whatsoever, TNA can’t give us a f*cking clean finish.
Then Madison Rayne came out to present Gail with her tiara… so rather than a meaningless accolade, they were apparently fighting over THE NICKNAME OF DELUSIONAL HEEL! WHAT THE F*CK?! The meaningless accolade might be meaningless, but at least it isn't an actively stupid thing to be fighting over.


Another horrifically sh*tty One Night Only show from TNA. The Knockouts Division used to be one of the things that really set TNA apart from everyone else. Now that they do a Knockouts-only PPV, it just shows how far that division has fallen. Most of the matches were given almost no time. On an entire two-hour and forty-five minute pay-per-view, only two matches were given more than eight minutes (and one of those was the entirely unnecessary gauntlet match main event). All of the other matches were given about five minutes… and for the life of me, I can’t understand why. It’s not like they ran out of time or anything! This show ran 2:43:23… and OVER FORTY-THREE MINUTES OF THAT WAS VIDEO PACKAGES! THAT’S OVER A QUARTER OF THE SHOW!
And it’s not like they were good video packages, either! They were recycled irrelevant video packages that were clearly just being used to kill time. TNA put ABSOLUTELY ZERO EFFORT into trying to make video packages for this show. They didn’t even cut and edit old ones to crop out irrelevant parts! So instead we got video packages hyping up matches that happened months ago! They made no effort to get us excited for anyone who wasn’t on the main roster, even if they had footage of that person from developmental or from previous runs in the company. That’s why, for example, there was more action in the video packages for Ivelisse and Lei’D Tapa, which was from places not owned by TNA than there was of Alyssa Flash, who wrestled in TNA for months! And why? Because TNA happened to have that footage lying around and is too damn lazy to make some new video packages.

Even worse was when they just threw out clips from various matches and segments in TNA history for no real reason other than a pathetic attempt to hype up the women who need the hype the least (those already on the roster) in completely ineffective ways. At least make a new graphic and call it the �"greatest moments of the Knockouts Division” or something to make it actually seem relevant rather than just playing random f*cking clips just for the sake of eating up time.

The disgusting amount of laziness that TNA showed here absolutely offends me as a fan. I only watched this show to do some due diligence for a TNA: Year in Review article I am writing, but I can assure you I will not be watching any more of these One Night Only shows. These show were supposed to replace the income lost by the monthly pay-per-views (and they needed two of these buys for everyone monthly they used to get). How TNA thought anyone would ever buy another of these One Night Only shows after seeing how little effort TNA put into them is beyond me.

In short, we got matches that were way to short and anything you could enjoy in that short time was likely ruined by the announcers treating the entire show like a f*cking joke, and an offensively small amount of effort put into the production. Between this and the reunion show, I am totally done with these things.


STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Mike Tenay- �"for the first time ever, the Knockouts are exclusively in the spotlight.”
So I guess that whole Knockouts New Year’s Eve episode of Impact just never happened?

2. Tenay- �"I just love this presentation of the competitors that, to me, is so reminiscent of major international shows.”
Really Mike? And what �"major international shows” might these be? If you mean �"the Olympics,” then JUST SAY IT. Otherwise you sound like you are talking out of your ass (which you often are).

3. Tenay miscalls a twisting Samoan Drop as a �"fall away slam.” Taz calls him out on this… and then claims that the �"fall away slam doesn’t exist.” So in other words, BOTH TNA announcers don’t know how to call basic professional wrestling moves!

4. Taz mentions that he was wondering if Alyssa Flash might be having some �"ring rust.” Because I guess Taz didn’t bother to do any research at all to find out if she had wrestled between now and the last time we saw her in TNA, which was a few years ago. Tenay corroborates this, so apparently �"professor” Tenay doesn’t do any research either.

5. Tenay- �"Gail Kim the first to move on to our gauntlet match-up. We’re going to fill slot number two in terms of the gauntlet with the victor of this match.”
OH MY G-D! Just say �"Gail Kim was the first to move on to the gauntlet match. The winner of this match will be the second.” It’s that simple! You don’t have to throw in pointless, repetitive descriptors. We KNOW you are talking about the second slot in the gauntlet match because YOU MENTIONED THAT GAIL WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO ADVANCE TO IT IN THE LAST F*CKING SENTENCE!

6. So Mia Yim comes out and what is the first thing that happens? That’s right! Taz purposely mispronounces her name. Because this match and this tournament and this division are such serious stuff that the announcers don’t even give a f*ck about trying to get the wrestlers over. They are just out to entertain themselves.

7. Taz thinks that Nomar Garciaparra’s first name is Jose. Tenay calls him out on this, but not on the fact that Taz repeatedly says that Mia Hamm, who is probably the only female soccer player to ever get mainstream attention in the United States, is a volleyball player.

8. Taz points out that Tara, who has recently moved to Chicago, is wearing the stars and colors of the flag of the city on her gear. Tenay tells him that there is no such thing as the Chicago flag and accuses Taz of not having prepared for this show.
That’s right. The moment Tenay calls Taz out for not being prepared at all is right after Taz finally says something intelligent!

9. Tenay talks about �"all of the victories Taryn has gotten with the spear.”
I believe that would be about zero, considering that it isn’t her finisher.

10. Tenay (after Jackie beats Taryn)- �"would you consider that an upset?”
This coming from the guy who kept hammering home that Tara had a huge experience advantage over Mia Yim… and he asks if Taz thinks Jackie Moore beating someone would be an upset. Moron.