Friendly Competition 6.30.07

I think this is going to be a really short column this week, mostly because we all know what the entire focus of this week has been on, and I already had my say in That Was Then yesterday and feel no need to rehash it here. I’m just going to move on and take a cue from WWE, making this a Chris Benoit-free column.

ECW World Champion: Johnny Nitro (Champion Since 6/24/2007)
TNA World Champion: Kurt Angle (Champion Since 6/17/2007)
TNA World Tag Team Champions: Team 3D (Champions Since 5/13/2007)
TNA X-Division Champion: Samoa Joe (Champion Since 6/21/2007)

People Who Impressed Me This Week

Johnny Nitro: Even though he lost, he did a good job of keeping up with John Cena this week in a pretty good singles match, though I do take issue with the ECW Champion being jobbed out on his own show like that.

Kurt Angle, Christian Cage, and Rhino: For putting on one of the best TV matches so far this year and what may have been the best match in the history of TNA Impact.

Chris Harris, Abyss, AJ Styles, Tomko, and James Storm: For interfering in such a way that it didn’t taint an awesome match.

Dickhead Of The Week: Johnny Nitro

I was really thinking of not having a Dickhead this Week, but in the end I had to give it to Johnny Nitro because, even though he did win the ECW World Title on Sunday, he was cleanly defeated in the middle of the ring on what is now his show. Not the greatest start to a title reign I’ve ever seen.

Vital Social Issues N’ Stuff With Stuart

It was really hard to try and come up with something to write here given what happened, but I do want to comment on the quality wrestling we saw on both shows this week. I think it’s exactly what we needed to get us started on moving on from the situation, and the seven men who saw official in-ring action did a great job of helping us forget about that and get back to enjoying wrestling. John Cena showed how well he’s developed as a worker, at least in the Sting sense that he has enough moves and more than enough charisma to carry a match. Johnny Nitro did a great job of working up to Cena’s level (weird as that sounds) and will make a great ECW Champion (though we can debate the World Title aspect…more on that next week). CM Punk and Elijah Burke work really well together, and we may be looking at a modern day Flair-Steamboat in that you have two young guys who work together a lot when they’re young, and as their careers go on they just get better and better that every match they work against one another becomes a classic. Finally, big props to three of the best pros around in Kurt Angle, Christian Cage, and Rhino for showing that they still have the talent to put together one hell of a story throughout a match. I think that if they kept up this quality of wrestling on TV every week, nobody would ever have anything to complain about.

Links To Stuff You Can Read

Again, I’m not going to link to anything about Chris Benoit because we need to start to move on.

Larry’s got the 4R’s of Vengeance.

The Summer Of Briscoe continues in The Independent Mid-Card.

Steve Cook’s got your questions covered in Ask 411 Wrestling.

Rob Halden pisses us off in You’re An Idiot And Here’s Why.

Finally, Sat & Uncle Trunx give us the High Road/Low Road of Vengeance.

What Did We Learn This Week?

In all things, there is at least one lesson to be learned. Here I will impart upon you what I took away from the weekly television of ECW and TNA. You too can learn important life lessons from Kevin Thorn and Maverick Matt, and are encouraged to send in your own revalations.

This week on ECW On Sci-Fi, I learned that…

-WWE are the masters of completely ignoring anything they don’t desire to acknowledge.

-They really need to start giving 2 out of 3 falls matches more than 10-15 minutes, otherwise it really defeats the purpose.

-Roddy Piper can still walk.

This week on TNA Impact, I learned that…

-Despite all the injuries, Kurt Angle can still do the marathon matches.

-Interference doesn’t necessarily ruin matches.

-Having longer matches really works for TNA and they should definitely do it more.

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That’s it for me, I’ll be back on Friday for That Was Then, and then right back here next Saturday for more ECW and TNA goodness. Let’s hope things calm down next week, shall we? See you soon and thanks for reading.