MCNEILL'S TAKE VIP - MCNEILL FACTOR: Stripped: Russo's rich history of vacating titles (#1024) May 7, 2008 - 3:36:51 PM

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By Pat McNeill, PWTorch columnist

VIP EXCLUSIVE - From PWTorch Newsletter #1024...

We spent a few weeks discussing the problems with World Wrestling Entertainment. It seems only fair to delve into the issues that haunt its chief competition, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling. TNA is currently in the middle of a tournament to crown new World Tag Team Champions. The belts were last held by the team of A.J. Styles & Travis Tomko, who captured them back at "Bound For Glory" in October 2007.

On the April 17th episode of Impact, Eric Young & Frankie Kazarian won the belts in a three-way match defeating the champs and the Latin American Xchange. Young left the ring during the match and came back under a hood as "Super Eric." When Eric claimed that he and "Super Eric" were different people, TNA Director of Authority Jim Cornette stripped the titles from Young & Kaz and held them up, to be awarded to the winners of the title tournament.

Why did TNA take the belts off of Styles & Tomko? Travis Tomko had heat with the promotion when he booked himself on a Japan show instead of making the Lockdown fanfest in Massachusetts last month. TNA suspended Tomko for a month.

Why did the promotion hold up the championship belts instead of having another team beat Styles & Tomko cleanly? Blame Vince Russo and Jeff Jarrett. Since TNA went on the air in June 2002, this is the fifth time the company's tag team titles have been held up. This seems to be a special condition that only affects the tag team championship. The X Division Title has been held up twice and the TNA Heavyweight Title only once.

It isn't as though TNA is the first promotion to ever hold up a championship belt or to play around with a title's lineage. In the territory days, titles were stripped from wrestlers and held up on occasion. It was a different era. Wrestlers didn't have guaranteed contracts, and the unplanned changes were born of necessity, not of convoluted booking ideas.

In 1988, Vince McMahon was getting set for WrestleMania IV. The World Wrestling Federation needed a way to follow up on the huge success of the Hulk Hogan-Andre the Giant match the previous year. Hogan and McMahon were collaborating on the movie "No Holds Barred." Hogan would need time off after WrestleMania to shoot the film. McMahon wanted to move the belt to someone else without having Hulk lose cleanly. On Feb. 5, 1988, Hogan lost to Andre the Giant thanks to Ted DiBiase paying off referee Earl Hebner. Andre gave the title to DiBiase, at which point WWF Commissioner Jack Tunney ruled that Andre had vacated the belt. There was a 14 man tournament at WrestleMania IV where Randy Savage captured the WWF Heavyweight Title. This scenario eventually led to Savage turning heel and defending the title against Hogan the next year at WrestleMania V. Vince McMahon and his bookers felt that Hogan chasing Savage would draw better than Savage trying to get the title off of Hogan.

WrestleMania IV is widely considered one of the worst WrestleManias in WWE history. But it obviously had an impact on Vince Russo. When Russo and Ed Ferrara were in charge of the WWF creative team in the fall of 1998, he booked a similar storyline where champion "Stone Cold" Steve Austin lost the title after being pinned simultaneously by Kane and The Undertaker. The WWF Title was held up, and there was another fourteen man tournament for the vacant championship. The three month storyline had the net effect of getting the championship belt off of Austin and onto "The Rock" Rocky Maivia without Austin losing to Rocky.

Less than one year later, the WWF Title was held up once again. In September 1999, Vince McMahon won the WWF Championship from Triple H on an episode of Smackdown, then promptly vacated the belt. The new champion was decided ten days later at the Unforgiven 1999 pay-per-view. Austin was the special guest referee as Hunter Hearst Helmsley regained the belt he had lost just ten days before. Russo was still one of the head writers for the company at that time.

Nine days later, Russo and Ed Ferrara jumped to World Championship Wrestling. Here's where things got fun. Russo was convinced he was on to something with the vacated title storylines. That's why Russo and Ferrara's very first move, on the very first weekend they were in charge, was to have Sting beat up referee Charles Robinson at Halloween Havoc on October 24, 1999. The next evening on Nitro, WCW figurehead J. J. Dillon stripped Sting of the title and announced a thirty-two man tournament for the vacant title. The tournament wrapped up at the November pay-per-view, "WCW Mayhem," where Bret Hart defeated the late Chris Benoit in the finals. Hart also beat Sting in that tournament, so it wasn't as though the tournament was designed to avoid having Sting do a job.

Were WCW fans confused, or even a little surprised, by Russo holding up the championship belt? Probably not, seeing as the WCW Hvt. Championship had already been held up four times since the belt was split off from the NWA World Title in the summer of 1991.

Having kicked off his World Championship Wrestling booking tenure by holding up the WCW World Title, it was a while before Vince Russo went back to the well again. More specifically, it took Russo one month. On December 20, 1999...

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