When I was in high school, some of my friends had this backyard wrestling fed, that I occasionally participated in from time to time. My “ring name” was The Yellow Meanie, which was a play on the fat blue haired blob in ECW who went under the name The Blue Meanie, except this was more racist in the obvious sense.
One day, for no other reason than boredom and an idea for our own amusement, I took an old weight belt, some cardboard, packing tape, spray paint and most importantly, an empty box of Popeye’s fried chicken, and I created the Popeye’s Championship Belt. It symbolized absolutely nothing at all, but regardless I brought it into our backyard wrestling federation and began “defending” it, and cutting promos about how important and prestigious it was.
That kind of logic, is basically what comes to mind when thinking about All Elite Wrestling’s new don’t-call-it-a-mid-card championship belt, the TNT Championship; yes, named after the network in which AEW airs its one and only program, Dynamite.
They’ve literally named a flagship championship after a television station, as if they didn’t seem remotely aware that networks can change, whether the network themselves re-brands or re-identifies, or the network changes directions, decides they don’t want professional ‘rasslin on their network anymore, and dumps them off to Spike TV or Destination America.
Additionally, they’ve designed the belt to the specific current TNT logo, again, ignoring the fact that in the last ten years, the TNT logo has changed twice prior, and could very well change again in coming years, as Turner is such a volatile company that’s always knocking on the door of being acquired by FOX every year, resulting in endless rounds of layoffs that many people I know in Atlanta have been victimized or threatened by but that’s another story.
But the thing is, that a TNT Championship doesn’t really tell any sort of symbolism at all. Cody Rhodes, bless his heart, wants so hard to be somewhat of a wrestling edgelord, which is ironic in itself, but wants to avoid labels and misconceptions of diminished value in comparison to the AEW World Championship, so instead of having a United States, Intercontinental, North American or any sort of other label, he decided to go with a belt that’s named after a television network?
I had to look it up, but ultimately, the TNT Championship is basically the equivalent of a television title, which makes a little bit more sense. Traditional television titles are titles that are to be defended whenever there’s television programming, but by that logic, the TNT Championship is only going to be defended on episodes of Dynamite. The YouTube-only Dark program is gray area on whether it’s “television” or not as it’s streaming on YouTube, and the periodic pay-per-view events are also gray on whether or not PPV is actually television.
Granted, just about every wrestling federation in history ends up scrapping the whole idea of television title rules, and they end up being belts in which storylines can be built around, and that’s probably what AEW is going to end up doing with the TNT Championship in no short order, but it wouldn’t hurt if they even tried to lay down some ground rules for it before they brought it out into existence.
Whatever though, the TNT Championship has arrived, been publicly introduced, and there’s little turning back now. Admittedly, I was slightly eagerly anticipating when the belt was going to be unveiled, because as a belt collector, the idea of new belts coming to fruition always excites me. But as a design overall, it’s lackluster, and even if there’s promise of a “finalized” design, because coronavirus put a delay on the original production, I can’t imagine that it’s going to be any better than what Mike Tyson presented to Cody Rhodes.
What’s laughable to me, and again I had to look it up, because I had no idea to what the logic was to the mansion on the side plates of the strap, but apparently that’s Ted Turner’s mansion. Somewhere along the line, Tony Khan, Cody Rhodes, or whomever had involvement in the design of the TNT Championship, seems to have forgotten that Uncle Ted has basically no involvement in Turner operations outright these days. His memory as the founder of the company is really all he has left, but when the day is over, those who actually run Turner/Time Warner/AT&T often times spend more time trying to scrub out Ted’s involvement with the company than trying to placate his existence.
In other words, AEW really had no idea on what to put on a side plate, and had to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with Ted Turner’s mansion. Honestly, a Jacksonville Jaguars’ logo would’ve made more sense than that, seeing as it would be a power move to give a nod to the entity that really signs the paychecks, but that’s just my opinion.
Bonus ironic points for using Benguiat AKA the Stranger Things font, for the “Champion” on the belt. Nothing like looking like a Stephen King cover to denote that they are in fact, a champion.
Either way, not that I necessarily want AEW to fail, but I would find a great deal of amusement if in the future, AEW is either dropped by TNT, or TNT changes their logo, and immediately makes the TNT Championship dead in the water. Because naming a championship after a network just seems like a very questionable idea, and I’d enjoy laughing at a questionable idea gone awry.
