Well, kids… here we are… again.
I wrote about this show back in 2015, which was a year after this show took place and I opened the post with the words, “TNA Bound For Glory 2014 has no real, viable purpose for existing. It is simply there.”
TNA was in a real, precarious state at this point. xxx The end result was sending a number of TNA second-stringers to a Wrestle-1 show in Japan, tape the show, and then package it as a Bound For Glory so they can charge their loyalist TNA fans premium PPV prices to watch. Now for those who don’t know what Wrestle-1 was, it was a promotion in Japan that was founded by legendary Japanese wrestler The Great Muta in 2013. Yes, the promotion that was hold TNA’s equivalent of Wrestlemania was a little over a year old.
Imagine WWE holding a Wrestlemania in Japan, but rather than staging it in the Tokyo Dome with all the pageant, pyro, and ballyhoo one typically associates with the event, they held it in a shitbox theater hall barely holding 400 people… AND it’s a co-production with another minor league Japanese promotion… AND none of the matches have any relevance on the WWE product because they already taped episodes of RAW and Smackdown to air for the next three months. It’d be pretty embarrassing… and yet that’s what happened with TNA.
One would presume to compare this to the eventual empty arena shows that the various promotions would hold during 2020, except you had prevailing circumstances that made those shows what they were. TNA was just in a bad state of affairs and whatever show they had intended to book on this Bound For Glory show would play out on free TV via episodes of Impact that very few people were watching… which is probably for the best that they had a taped show fill in for what was supposed to be their big premiere cornerstone event that even fewer people knew existed, let alone fork down actual money to watch.
So I had already seen this show and did a musings on this ages ago. A buddy of mine had sent a DVD recording of this thing and wanted me to share some thoughts on the show. I told him I’d do it on the condition that he would order that year’s BFG and we could watch it together. Something I’m sure he would have done anyway since he was still watching TNA… the poor bastard. But regardless, I wrote some thoughts and… well, those thoughts can be read here if you wish.
So like I said in the intro, Bound For Glory 2014 was taped from the Korakuen Hall in Tokyo, Japan, which was primarily a Wrestle-1 show that TNA taped and branded into Bound For Glory. Because of this, we have the return of the traditional four-sided ring as opposed to TNA’s trademark six-sided ring that was brought back some time prior. Jeff Jarrett introduced the six-sided ring when Impact first debuted on Fox Sportsnet in 2004 and was pretty much a defining feature of the promotion until Hulk Hogan and friends came along and ditched it, which turned out to be a controversial decision. And then they brought it back in 2014 because that was a popular Impact staple that, amazingly, the current management has NOT brought back… which probably is for the best, all things considered.
Perennial Japanese wrestler Minoru Tanaka beat TNA guy Manik with an armbreaker submission in a pretty decent match; a nice solid showing for better or worse. But therein lies the problem; it was a pretty decent match featuring guys that I don’t care about.
TNA guy (and future TNA World champ) Ethan Carter III defeated Ryota Hama – a burly mass of a man who was a former sumo wrestler, but young me was ignorant and thus referred to him as a Japanese fatso… to be fair, this is coming someone who was largely chubby for most of his natural life and… nowadays, I’m far less so, so I’m going to be nice this time around… but yeah, the early days of EC3 wasn’t much to look at, but considering he had become something of a fixture during these troubling TNA days, it’s amazing to see him break away from the Derrick Bateman image that he fostered in NXT. Nonetheless, this match was the drizzling shits, as no matter how much I try to respect this Ryota person, he still comes across as a poor man’s Rikishi, right down to the stinkface.
I missed this one the first time around, but there was a match between MVP (yes, THAT MVP – who’s quite the popular gaijin ’round these parts) and Japanese sensation Kazma Sakamoto… whom I am not familiar with, but apparently, this guy was the former manager of Lord Tensai… which took me a while to recall before I remembered this as being Matt Bloom’s failed reboot in his second WWE stint. It was a fairly short match with little of consequence happening, but the people dug MVP for whatever that’s worth. Still, I can’t say that I missed much the first time around.
TNA X-Division champ Samoa Joe defeated Low Ki and Kaz Hayashi via submission to retain the title, which hadn’t been much of a surprise considering Impact taping results spoiled the result of this match… oops. Anyway, the match was just… eh, it was fine. It was three guys doing their thing before Joe submitted Low Ki with the Clutch, then cut a promo in Japanese for the crowd. I called this Joe’s last hurrah before he made the jump to NXT and I can’t help but feel that he didn’t do much else of consequence afterwards beyond dropping the title to (check notes) nobody, since he apparently vacated the title due to not being medically cleared… or so that’s what Wikipedia says. Sure, pal. Whatever you say.
Jiro Kuroshio/Yusuke Kodama defeated Andy Wu/El Hijo del Pantera in a match that happened. It’s a fine match, but it’s all Wrestle-1 talent that I’m not familiar with and thus it’s just a thing that happened. Unless these folks appeared on Impact later down the road – I doubt it – why should I care about what’s going on in this match?
Team 3D defeated Tommy Dreamer and Abyss in a hardcore tag match that made me long for any Dudley Boyz tables match that took place in ECW or WWF/E. Hell, I’ll even pop in the ECW One Night Stand match between the Dudleyz and Dreamer/Sandman for good measure. This is the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a TNA house show or an ECW Reunion show. For what it is, it’s… I don’t know. The same match I’ve seen many, many, many times over the decades. Abyss even pulls out the tacks and falls on them for good measure. What a trooper, but… yeah, been there, done that, moving on.
Knockouts Champion Havok defeated Velvet Sky to retain the title and hey, you know what? I didn’t give this match enough credit the first time around because… let’s be frank; this show gave me no reason to, but for what this was, this wasn’t half bad in putting over Havok as the monster champion and Velvet Sky was the foil that got a few licks in before being eaten alive. Short but sweet; sometimes, that’s all you really need to get your monsters over.
And in the main event of this Bound For Glory show – your most important card of the year, remember – we have a nothing happening tag team match between former WWE superstar Tajiri teaming with Japanese legend The Great Muta and TNA wrestler James Storm teaming with Japanese talent Sanada, who is apparently the other TNA guy in this match… and of course, the TNA guys get jobbed out to the elder statesmen of Japan, which prompts Storm and Sanada to beat the old guys up before Team 3d shows up to make the save and end the show on a semi-happy note… I guess. Like I said before, Tajiri is a WWE alumnus, Great Muta is a damn-near icon in Japanese wrestling, James Storm is a tried-and-true TNA veteran, and Sanada… is some Japanese guy who ended up taking the fall when the whole story was around James Storm being an asshole to the Japanese guys. I don’t know, man. Is this the best you could come up with for your main event angle? Wasn’t he feuding with Aldis around that time or am I misremembering things?
Bound For Glory 2014 is a completely disposable, utterly forgettable wrestling show that is, if nothing else, more of a sampler for the Wrestle-1 promotion than anything of merit to the common TNA fan who would’ve ordered this show in hopes of seeing where things progress from here. I don’t know if we even got that much because the show was just a bunch of nothing matches with wrestlers just spinning their wheels until the next set of Impact tapings. I want to say that this was the worst Bound For Glory ever conceived just based on the fact that it simply didn’t feel like a Bound For Glory show. I don’t know if I can call it that considering I’ve seen far worse cards where they actually tried, but I can’t blame you for thinking that to be the case. I can’t imagine being a TNA fan at the time and thinking that THIS was worth your PPV dollars.
Honestly, watching this show at the time, no one would blame you for thinking that TNA would be on its last legs if THIS was the show they chose to present as Bound For Glory. But as fate would have it, Wrestle-1 would cease operations in 2020, just as prevailing circumstances shut the world down.
As for TNA? They’re still around.
At this point, why are you even surprised?
