In the Saturday Sunday Supplement, the Diva Dirt team will aim to discuss a news story, a televised event or other relevant and current topics. The objective, like the average weekend newspaper, is to offer more indepth and lengthy discussion.
TNA is setting out to live up to their tagline, ‘Cross the Line’, but not in the ways you would think. In an attempt to push even more boundaries and utilize their ever-growing roster of Knockouts, they’ve decided to implement a tag team division. In the coming weeks, a tournament will take place to determine the first ever Knockouts Tag Team Champions. The question is will the division work?
Serious women’s tag team wrestling has been a niche for quite some time now. During the mid-80s, it was rare to see a women’s match let alone a tag team match. However, that didn’t stop the World Wrestling Federation from making a tag team division for the ladies. In 1983, Velvet McIntyre and Princess Victoria’s NWA Women’s Tag Team Championship belts were converted into the WWF Women’s Tag Team Championship when the two defected from the National Wrestling Alliance and joined WWF. In it’s six years of existence, the belts passed through the hands of several teams before they were captured by the Jumping Bomb Angels (Noriyo Tateno and Itsuki Yamazaki), who would be be the last women to hold the titles before they became defunct in 1989.
Women’s tag team wrestling became all but extinct until the mid-2000s, when all-female promotions such as Women Superstars Uncensored and most notably SHIMMER brought it back into the limelight.
It is assumed that any women in professional wrestling with a position of power would want to advocate their women. Surely they would want to create a strong, empowered representation of their Divas, Knockouts et al for the audience? Given hindsight, it can be argued that isn’t the case. In fact, looking at the McMahon family and the two women in prominent roles, Linda and Stephanie McMahon, what have either of these women really done for the Divas in WWE?
