Eric Young leaves TNA

No longer a problem.

It is being reported that Eric Young has turned down a contract extension from TNA and left the company after a six year run.  From what I’ve read, he was offered substantially less money and he declined.  He does not have a no-compete clause that would prevent him from immediately appearing elsewhere.

In my view, it’s probably the best thing Young could possibly have done after the 2010 he’s had.  After spending months rebuilding his image after a lengthy stint as a mentally-challenged (for lack of a better term) comedy act, Young broke out as an underdog face until he turned heel last year.

He became the leader of the World Elite which took the dominant stable role at the end of 2009 after the breakup of the Main Event Mafia.  He finished off the year having upset Kevin Nash for the Legends title, which he renamed the Global title to go along with his stable.

Upon the arrival of Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff in January, the World Elite suddenly vanished without explanation, and Young remained MIA (along with most of the roster) for some time.  When he returned, he was once again a face (likewise without explanation), allied with Kevin Nash against The Band.  After being betrayed by Nash and feuding with him for a month, he joined The Band for no real reason.  The heel turn got him a tag title run (via the Freebird Rule) until being stripped of the title due to Scott Hall’s arrest and subsequent release from the company.

Spending weeks on Xplosion, Young suffered a “head injury” from Suicide by tumbling off the turnbuckle to the floor.  That put him right back into the simpleton role that he fought so hard to escape over the past years.  He spent the rest of the year in a rather offensive team with Orlando Jordan which was nothing more than an in-joke to make gay jokes at their expense.

You will be missed, Eric.  But maybe not actually in TNA until Hogan and Bischoff either leave the company or simply finish flying it into the ground.

In other news, Robbie E. of Shore holds the X-Division title after just three matches in the company.

Too much of a good thing – TNA Impact 9/10/09

There are a lot of good things about TNA, I will admit.  Amongst those things is the international group World Elite, led by Eric Young.  It’s made up of several international faces with a lot of wrestling talent.  Young himself isn’t bad on the mic either, and has taken quite well to his heel role.  Unfortunately, when the group is featured in four seperate segments (along with the British Invasion in the opening match), it gets tiring.  When all four of those segments involve speeches by Young, it gets painful.  But you want it, TNA delivers.

The storyline started with a shakeup of the oft-mentioned ‘agreement’ between the Elite and the Main Event Mafia when Brutus Magnus won the opening gauntlet tag match by pinning Scott Steiner.  Whoops.  First, Young told Jeremy Borash that he wouldn’t apologize for it, then later, he basically repeated himself to Kurt Angle and the rest of the MEM.  At this point, the MEM look like they want no part of the Elite, which could make an interesting feud later – one that could possibly mean a face turn for the entire MEM.  Wouldn’t that be weird?

With that settled (all in the first hour), the World Elite went back to their original angle of trying to recruit Hernandez, only to get a painfully awful rant by Hector Guerrero.  He was trying awfully hard to be Eddie, and after the 20th or 30th ‘Ese’, I skipped to the end for the inevitable beatdown…that never came.  The Elite simply left.  Finally, after the main event, they returned with Homicide in tow, bringing an attack by Hernandez that ended when Homicide betrayed his LAX partner and sided with the Elite.

Now that part I quite enjoyed, and Homicide brings an interesting new face and style to the World Elite.  Overall, though, the group is simply stretched too thinly without enough talkers to balance it at this point.  Abdul Bashir and Kiyoshi are doing nothing at this point, the British Invasion is in the tag team title hunt (with no storyline for the belts they already have) and Eric Young gets to rant on for what felt like three-fourths of the show.

After the jump, we’ll take a bullet point look at the rest of the show.