Another year, another Bound For Glory PPV event, another Bound For Glory main event featuring Sting challenging for the World title… again. I’ve got little to say about this edition, as I was largely ignoring TNA for the most part, so we’ll see if this is at least better than last year’s show that I sampled last week.
Jay Lethal defeated nine other guys in a Steel Asylum match to earn a future X-Division title shot. For those who don’t know or remember, a Steel Asylum is a big ol red-barred steel cage with an opening on top of the dome-like structure and the idea is that whoever climbs out of the hole on top wins the match. And because they packed ten guys in this one cage, it’s almost impossible to keep track of what’s going on. If you had about five or six guys at most, that’s fine. More than that, however, and it becomes a cluster. Add an obnoxious jungle gym on top of that and it’s a fucking eyesore. I would’ve been fine with another Ultimate X match opening the show instead of this tin can situation. Next.
Rhino, ODB, and Rhaka Kahn defeated Billy Gu… er, I mean, Cute Kip and the Beautiful People (Velvet Sky and Angelina Love) in a truly horrible match. I mean, yeah, whenever Rhino and Billy are going at it, it’s fine, but whenever you involve the ladies, it’s kind of dreadful. Beautiful People, at the time, was a relatively new act that would be around TNA for quite some time, but this was hardly a good introduction to the team. They needed a better team of women to work with… or at the very least, ODB needed a better partner because this Rhaka person was… not very good… and then she went off the deep end at some point or something… why am I watching these TNA shows that feature matches with questionable people?
X-Division Champion Sheik Abdul Bashir (a.k.a. Sean Davari playing the evil foreigner because of course, he is) defeated Consequences Creed (the future Xavier Woods) in a thing that happened. Not great, not bad, just there, quickly forgotten about not long after. But hey, if you wanted to see Xavier Woods in TNA, here’s one match to feed that need, I guess.
Knockouts champion Taylor Wilde defeated Roxxi and Awesome Kong to retain the title in a so-so triple threat. I only barely remember Taylor Wilde as she briefly made a comeback a few years back in TNA, but that’s about the extent of it. The match itself was okay. It was a thing that happened, but that’s about all I got out of it… though I’d imagine it’s still a step above whatever you were getting out of the Divas division in WWE around that same time.
Beer Money (Robert Roode and James Storm defeated, Matt Morgan/Abyss, Team 3D, and LAX in a Monsters Ball hardcore tag match to retain the titles. Steve “Mongo” McMichael was the special ref for some reason, but he didn’t really factor into the match whatsoever, so I never got the point. Anyway, this was a perfectly fine Monster Ball match that was a step above the previous year’s iteration.
Booker T defeated AJ Styles and Christian Cage in a pretty fun triple threat match that actually AJ Styles not eat a fucking pin in a match featuring two former WWE guys. Not much else to add to this one, I was enjoying this quite a bit.
Jeff Jarrett defeated Kurt Angle with an assist from the debuting Mick Foley, who was being welcomed backstage in vignettes throughout the show. This was Jarrett’s first match in quite some time, having taken time off to deal with his wife’s cancer. I make no secrets about Jarrett in TNA being not that great, but there are rare occasions where I can enjoy a Jeff Jarrett match enough to consider it good and this was one of them. Helps that he’s in there with Kurt Angle, who had become such a finely tuned wrestling machine (no pun intended) that you’d have to suck real bad for him not to get a good match out of you. Probably one of the few times I can say something positive about Jarrett in TNA and those who read these PPV and TNA musings know how rare those can be.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… but the ICON Sting defeated TNA World Champion It Doesn’t Matter (but in case you care, it’s Samoa Joe this time around) to win the title… again. Why? I swear to God Sting is like the original Roman Reigns… except people actually LIKE Sting, so… joke’s on me, I guess? So yeah, it was a perfectly fine match until Nash went in and hit Joe with the bat to give Sting the win. I keep forgetting that this was when the Main Event Mafia – a stable of old guys – were becoming a thing and they’d continue to be a thing until the end of 2009 when word came in that Hulk Hogan was coming. I mean, yeah, look, the match was fine, but you’re sacrificing your homegrown talent with potential to be a big star in your promotion for STING, who was getting to be a bit long in the tooth as a World title contender. Chances are I’d have a much different opinion of this match had I watched it back then, but all I see here is potential star power squandered because the people in charge had no fucking clue on how to build stars to take THEIR promotion to the next level. Instead, they underused, if not outright MISUSED, their homegrown talent to the point where they left TNA and became big stars elsewhere… which, for a while, was the case with AEW a few years back.
Bound For Glory 2008 was a far better show than the 2007 version with a couple really good matches on here, but there was more meh than yay in this outing and once again, we’ve got STTTTIIIINNNNGGGG in the main event winning the World title. Three for three, for fuck’s sake. Enough already.
Well, we’re looking at 2009 next week and what’s the main event?
TNA World Champion AJ Styles defending the title against… STING.
Where’s that Cornette face?
There we go.
