For our final day of Kurt Angle Appreciation Week brought about by national tragedy 23 years ago, we’re looking at TNA Hard Justice 2007. Otherwise known as the show where they just gave Kurt Angle ALL the gold.
But yes, the main event for this match sees reigning X-Division and Tag-Team champion Samoa Joe putting his belts on the line against reigning TNA World Heavyweight Champion (and also IWGP Champion… kinda) Kurt Angle in a Winners Take All title bout. Which means everything else beneath that main event means nothing and while my brain tells me that I should just stick with the main event and skip the rest, I feel compelled to watch the whole thing because it’s…
Aw, fuck it. I should have listened to my brain.
Jay Lethal and Sonjay Dutt defeated the Motor City Machineguns (Chris Sabin and Alex Shelley) and Triple X (Christopher Daniels and Senshi a.k.a. Low Ki) in a surprisingly dull and incredibly boring three-way match. And I say that because these guys are usually capable of putting on some good matches or at least, some fun spot shows. This was neither. This was a bunch of stuff happening and then the match ends with a roll-up. I’d go with the classic example of booking someone to fall into vat of acid laced with barbed wire and exploding bombs, only for them to recover and win the match with a knee to the face… but apparently, this year’s Double Or Nothing actually played out something similar, so that stings a little.
Kazarian (or just KAZ this time around… because if it worked for TAZ…) defeated Raven in a thing that happened. I’m being EXTREMELY generous in saying that.
James Storm defeated Rhino in a bar room brawl that involved Rhino downing copious amounts of alcohol and then getting his ass kicked by Storm as a result. According to background information, Rhino is a “recovering alcoholic” who suddenly relapsed during this match and that proved to be his downfall… and people are supposed to cheer for this guy? Shades of gray? More like shades of puke green and piss yellow. I can normally enjoy a good hardcore street fight, but I didn’t like this one. The alcohol hits a bit close to home for me and that usually doesn’t happen with me with these wrestling shows.
LAX defeated the former New Age Outlaws (please don’t make me spell out their shitty TNA name that Russo thought was clever but it’s not because he’s a hack) in a dreadful match. The crowd is chanting for DX Rejects and I’m not sure what they mean by that. The Outlaws are former members of DX – well, present-tense, they’re Hall Of Fame members of DX; the group was inducted around 2019-ish. Are LAX the DX rejects? Do they have glowsticks I don’t know about? Also, this is 2007; DX wasn’t even a thing anymore ever since Hunter had that quad injury early that year. Are the TNA Zombies that behind the times?
Robert Roode defeated Eric Young via brass knux… Roode is trying to be the rich guy gimmick, but isn’t quite glorious. Eric Young is still very much in that Scrappy-Doo phase, but not yet in the comedic phase… if that makes sense. Listen, I’ll be honest; I was bored, I barely remember anything other than Traci Brooks getting tarred and feathered after the match and the brass knuckles used to end poor EY. Everything else is a blank and even in trying to revisit my notes, my mind is a blank. This show is slowly but surely killing my brain.
Chris Harris defeated Black Reign (Dustin Rhodes in a crappy Goldust-like gimmick that is so crappy that even Dustin thought it sucked) via DQ when Dustin caused one too many ref bumps over multiple refs. I’ll just leave this here and move on…
The Steiner Brothers (Scott and Rick, the latter having seen better days) defeated Team 3D in a dream match thing that happened. Honestly, I didn’t know what what I was expecting out of this other than big dudes killing each other and they certainly did that. Apparently, they’d have a couple more matches after this, so… yay, I guess?
There’s a bit with Kurt Angle talking to Kevin Nash, who’s apparently a shrink at this point. And then some guy named Pacman Jones comes out and cuts a promo, which draws out R-Truth, who tells Jones to watch his back. We get hype for the Doomsday Cage Of Blood match or whatever this stupid thing is supposed to be called and afterwards, Pacman Jones is down and out backstage… and the crowd – which people like to call TNA Zombies for their perchant to cheer anything and everything under the sun – approve of this Pacman fellow getting murdered backstage… well, it is Florida.
Abyss, Andrew “Test” Martin (dubbed the Punisher here), and Sting defeated The Coalition (Christian Cage, AJ Styles, and Tomko) in a six-man match that saw Abyss pin Styles to earn himself a future World Title match. Oh, and the match takes place in a steel cage surrounded by barbed wire on top… oh and the only way to win the match is to pin someone who is bleeding. If they’re not bleeding, they can’t be pinned, so… I don’t know; you’d figure that having a steel cage wrapped in barbed wire is enough to clue you in that somebody (or somebodies) gonna be wearing the proverbial crimson mask, but making that part of the stipulation to win the match? Really? Isn’t that a bit redundant and stupid?
This match was a thing that happened… I’d say more, but I’m trying to be nice here. By the way, this would be the former Test’s one and only TNA match before leaving the company shortly afterwards. He w0uld pass away in 2009 at the age of 33.
TNA World Champion and IWGP Champion (kinda) Kurt Angle defeated X-Division Champion and Tag-Team Champion Samoa Joe with an assist from then-wife Karen (a.k.a. the current Karen Jarrett, wife of Jeff… that’s a can of worms for another day to be told by somebody else) disguised as one of Russo’s trademark swerves to win all the gold. So, apparently, Kurt and Karen were having marriage problems and teasing a break-up, but as it turns out, it was a swerve and Karen turned on Joe to help Kurt win all the gold. It was a really good match marred by an incredibly predictable and outright stupid Russorific finish, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.
So… about Kurt’s IWGP title reign… once upon a time, Brock Lesnar had a tour in New Japan and won the IWGP title, but was then stripped of the title by New Japan in July. Japanese wrestling legend Antonio Inoki started his own promotion, the Inoki Genome Federation, and continued to recognize Brock Lesnar as the reigning IWGP champion, who would go on to lose the title to Kurt Angle overseas. So while TNA recognizes Angle as the reigning IWGP Heavyweight Champion, New Japan does not and at no point will you find Kurt Angle’s name in any official IWGP title history. In any event, Angle would hold on to this title until February 2008, where he would lose the belt against the reigning official IWGP champion Shinsuke Nakamura in a title unification match to bring that whole mess to a close while the Genome people would introduce their own World title… but that’s another story for another time to be told by other people.
Which I wish I could have said about the rest of this show… but… um…
Yeah… listen, guys. Hard Justice sucked.
Keep it Pinky.
Later.
dtm666 