Tournaments And Pro Wrestling Go Hand in Hand
It's been five or six weeks (Hard to keep up) since Ring of Honor returned to television with fresh matchups since the pandemic began. In holding a tournament to crown a new champion for the revived PURE championship, they have produced quality matches, quality video packages, and may just have reinvented the company. ROH has used the tournament format to their advantage and they're not the only organization that has done so, over the course of the pandemic.
NXT, AEW, WWE, NJPW, and NXT UK have all held tournaments to produce entertaining, quality matches. From straight brackets to round robin styles, these past few months have shown the power of tournaments.
NXT held a tournament to crown a new cruiserweight champion when Jordan Devlin was unable to get back overseas due to borders being closed. Santos Escobar who I'm a huge fan of and will be a major player in the WWE won the championship. NXT has held several notable tournaments including the Breakout tournament and the annual Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Tournament. Before this year was turned upside down WWE held the Mae Young Classic tournament for the past 3 years highlighting female talent from around the world. Upon returning to producing content NXT UK announced the NXT UK Heritage Cup Championship.
In the spring WWE utilized a tournament to crown a new Intercontiential champion when Sami Zayn elected not to work at the beginning of the pandemic, upon his return in September it was parlayed into a storyline that he was the real IC champion. This culminated in a very exciting ladder match between Sami, Jeff Hardy, and AJ Styles at Clash Of Champions last month.
AEW held a tournament to crown the first ever TNT Champion, An all womens tag team tournamnet called The Deadly Draw that occured over the month of August. This week the AEW Eliminator Tournmanet will begin with the winner becoming the #1 contender for the AEW Heavyweight Championship. It look's like part of AEW's game plan will be to hold frequent tournaments to build stars within their roster. In addition to the deadly draw tournament and #1 contender tournament, they've also held a tournament for the TNT championship and Tag Team Championship.
NJPW's annual New Japan Cup was postponed from March until July due to the pandemic, while the highly anticipated G1 Climax tournament was already planned to occur in the fall as opposed to the
These tournaments roughly occuring around the same time has shown how much tournaments can bring to wrestling organizations. At it's core tournaments can serve several functions and provide value to an organization and their roster. Tournaments often are used to advance storylines or in most cases crown a new champion of a title.
They also can be used to create new stars for the promotion, think of the King of the Ring tournament which was often a symbol the WWE (then WWF) was eyeing the winner as the next star to bid on. Ring of Honor's Top Prospect Tournament often highlights talent the organization feels stock is continually rising.
The independent wrestling scene is notorious for holding tournaments which is how many wrestlers build their name on the indy's. The ECWA Super 8 Tournament, PWG's Battle of Los Angeles Tournament, CZW Tournament of Death, Chikara's King of Trios and so many more.
I personally enjoy a good tournament no matter if their fighting for a championship, a piece of hardware, or bragging rights, tournaments raise the stakes and I wish it was employed more often. They create good television and can organically create and build storylines. Readers do you think wrestling organizations could use more tournaments or there's risk of too many watering them down?
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