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On Impact on Thursday night, at the start of the show, Sting drove up in an expensive yellow sports car. Kip offered to park the car for Sting, playing up his gimmick that he's being kept around by TNA to do menial tasks rather than wrestle. He told Lauren he used to own a car like that. She asked when. He said:

"When I was over."

That was meant to be a knee-slappingly funny insider reference. But what did it really accomplish? Maybe a few people backstage got a kick out of it. Maybe Vince Russo felt the insider fans would go to sleep at night feeling so fortunate that he let them in on the inner workings of wrestling by referring to someone being "over." Maybe someone backstage chuckled at Kip's expense.

What it was, though, is a small, but relevant, symptom of what's wrong with TNA's approach to presenting its product. In the context of a wrestling show, wrestlers should care about one thing - winning. Promoters should care about one thing - wrestlers who win. The rest should take care of itself. Watching a wrestling show should not be about watching wrestlers try to "get over" so they can "draw" any more than a network drama should be about actors reading their lines well so they can draw ratings. Of course that's the real goal of each show's existence, but it's a behind-the-scene goal that when brought into the context of the show messes everything up.

If you were watching "Law & Order" and a judge broke into a line about how he was up for the main part in that show, but he's not "over" anymore and so he got this lousy three line part, it'd totally break the mood. People tune in to "Law & Order" to be drawn into a story about cops and lawyers and criminals, not be brought into the struggle to draw ratings or cast the best actors to make the show as believable as possible.

Same thing with wrestling. Terms like "over" and even "ratings" should never make it onto the air. If the storyline with Kip is that he's got a job in TNA doing relatively menial tasks because management feels bad for him or a sense of loyalty to help him pay the bills, Kip's line when Lauren asked him when he had an expensive sport car should have been:

"When I was winning."

On a wrestling show, wrestlers should be kept around and earning big money because they win, not because they're over. A lot of athletes are "over" with fans in a local sports town, but they're not good enough to play any more. John Stockton and Karl Malone could still sell out in Utah if basketball was about the bond players had with fans and the charisma they showed on the court. But it's not. It's about the best players who help you win sticking around. That's what wrestling shows should portray is the be all, end all. It should purport without exception to be all about a show that features those who are the best at what they do - beating up other wrestlers to the point of scoring pins and submissions. Anything else is a self-indulgent distraction.

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Wade Keller is the editor and founder of Pro Wrestling Torch Newsletter and PWTorch.com. The Torch Newsletter was first published in October 1987 and has since delivered millions of copies of insider news and analysis to dozens of countries over the last 25 years. It is available by subscription by clicking here. Some subscribers receive the paper copy in their mailboxes each week and others subscribe to the online version available in PDF each week.

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