An embarrassing week for TNA management only gets worse

TNA management, whose creative judgment was already called into question on Sunday night when they wheeled out an obviously inebriated Jeff Hardy for his scheduled PPV main event with Sting for what turned out to be a farcical 90 second match, managed to make an embarrassing week for themselves worse on Monday night at their Impact tapings.  As StreetofCrocodiles fan posted yesterday on Cageside Seats, Hulk Hogan was forced to apologise on Twitter for a tasteless promo remark where he suggested that wrestlers from all over the world wanted to join his tsunami that was taking over wrestling.  Thankfully someone at TNA or Spike TV had the good sense to edit the comment out of Hogan's promo before it could even be aired, but such an insensitively timed crack should never have been even uttered.  Hogan claimed the line was unscripted and off the cuff, which is of course possible for a veteran hand who would have more creative freedom to go out there and ad lib part of his promo, but I'm getting vibes of WWE similarly claiming that Stacy "Miss Kitty" Carter's overzealousness caused her "unauthorised" breast flashing at the Armageddon PPV in 1999.  Such a lightning rod line like that was much more likely suggested to Hogan by script writer Vince Russo or if it was genuinely his idea then he would have almost certainly run it past everyone at the production meeting for the taping beforehand.  Moreover, it's hard to believe Hogan when Kurt Angle was scripted to say that he wanted to hunt down and kill his ex wife Karen and her new husband Jeff Jarrett in a promo on the exact same TV tapings.  More bad news for TNA discussed after the jump.

If this wasn't bad enough for TNA, then came the bad publicity that they had failed to renew Daffney's contract, probably because she had filed a workers' compensation claim for injuries she sustained in a TNA ring (thanks to SantiagoVelasquez for fan posting about this yesterday).  Daffney suffered serious injuries on two separate occasions while wrestling for TNA.  Firstly, at Bound For Glory 2009 she suffered a serious concussion and a broken arm after Abyss choke slammed her off the top rope onto a barbed wire board outside to the floor below in a reckless stunt:

Then, just six months later, having rushed back to action from her previous injuries, Daffney was placed in jeopardy again, this time by being booked in a tryout dark match with green Team 3D trainee Betsy Ruth.  The end result was Daffney having a deeply bruised sternum, a stinger and another concussion, after Ruth botched several of her big moves.  Of course, the icing on the proverbial cake was TNA signing Betsy Ruth, repackaging her as Rosie Lottalove and using the footage of her injuring Daffney to try and get her over in her unsurprisingly short-lived career as a TNA Knockout: 

So on paper this seems like a pretty open and shut case in favour of Daffney, given how she sustained her catalogue of injuries.  Hopefully this will teach Dixie Carter a lesson that she needs to improve working conditions for her low paid undercard talent, in particular pay for the treatment of any injuries that happened on her watch.

More bad news came today from Dave Meltzer, as TNA may have lost their TV exposure in Australia:

--TNA may be losing television in Australia as its contract with Fox8 has expired with no new deal in place.

Perhaps the only silver lining was Jeff Hardy getting his umpteenth continuance in his never ending drug case, but how that'll get him to clean his act up God only knows.  Poor Steven Godfrey having to point to a drug testing policy where they rarely test and never punish.