Before he feuded with people whose fathers were DEAD, Christian Cage was a guy that people liked, but WWE treated as a midcarder. So one day, he decides to leave WWE and ply his trade in TNA, where he’d eventually get a title match against reigning NWA World Champion Jeff Jarrett.
Took me a while, but I finally got to watch this show and… eh…
Let’s dive in…
We’ve got a 30-minute Ironman rubber match between Samoa Joe and Kurt Angle. Three matches in three months. That’s the only reason why I’m watching tolerating this show. My only hope is that it’s better than the last one.
Turning Point 2006 was the final TNA PPV of the year and featured the (not) long-awaited (enough) rematch between Kurt Angle and Samoa Joe, which was pretty much the hottest thing they had going at the time. Kurt Angle, of course, gave Samoa Joe his first real defeat (that wasn’t a 3-way loss where someone else took the fall) and kicked off a career renaissance of sorts. Conventional wisdom would suggest holding off the rematch for later down the road, but sometimes, wrestling promotions rarely follow conventional wisdom. And I don’t say that as a knock on Vince Russo, who was hired back by TNA earlier that year. WWE has been guilty of the same thing as well over the years.
Anyway, it’s Joe vs. Angle II. Something they could’ve held off a couple months until their next big tentpole event, but I guess TNA felt threatened by that ECW PPV taking place the same month with a week’s worth of build. I wonder how that show turned out.
Quick note before we begin today’s scheduled musings… so, for the month of October, we are foregoing the weekly PPV Musings and when we return in November, it’ll be covering this year’s Bound For Glory PPV. Bound For Glory is TNA’s flagship PPV event, similar to a Wrestlemania or Starrcade… okay, that might be stretching it nowadays, but you get the general idea. Anyway, this’ll be the first Bound For Glory show that I’ve watched live since… ages. And given how good the TNA product has been this year, I’m sure they’ll be delivering a fine enough show for the ages… which is more than what I can say for today’s subject matter.
As a matter of fact, I had gone ahead and watched the TNA Victory Road show from a couple weeks ago and that was a great show, probably one of the better TNA outputs I’ve seen in this new era. The smart side of my brain suggests that I talk about this show before taking the break from musings to focus on the October marathon of reviews… but sadly, I’m not listening to the smart side of the brain today because soon afterwards, I jumped into the TNA archives to watch the Bound For Glory show from October 10, 2010.
Yes, the 10-10-10 edition of Bound For Glory. Otherwise known as Vincent “Big Vinny V” Verhei’s birthday… yeah, not quite a happy birthday for him, I’m sure.
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.
Dear lord, are we actually diving into the dreaded period of TNA from the year 2010… again?
But yeah, see, they tell me this is a good show… and there’s a really good Kurt Angle match on this show… which is where we’re doing this show as part of Kurt Angle Appreciation week. Let’s dive in and check this show out.
We kick off this week of Kurt Angle appreciation with his TNA in-ring debut at TNA Genesis 2006, which saw Angle go up against the unstoppable Samoa Joe after their fateful encounter during Angle’s first night with the company.
A TNA PPV Musings? From 2010, you say? The Hogan era?
Yeah, didn’t I hate that era?
Sure, because I mostly stuck with the television show… whenever I could be bothered to watch the television show, that is. And yes, the week-to-week television was largely atrocious. However, sometimes you buy one of their PPVs and you luck out on a good show… clearly back in the day, that didn’t happen. And when it comes to Against All Odds 2010 – the second PPV in the Hogan era – I’m not sure if I’d go that far, BUT this wasn’t too bad.
A large part of the show is built around a single-night eight man tournament to crown a new No. 1 contender for the World Title at the upcoming Lockdown PPV (not the next one, the next one is shit) as well as AJ Styles defending his TNA World title against Samoa Joe… with Eric Bischoff as the special referee… for some reason. Let’s see if he can call this down the middle and not suddenly complain about Dave Meltzer for half an hour like he does on his podcast… but I digress.
So I watched Slammiversary this past weekend… no, I didn’t attend the show – it took place in Montreal in front of a packed 5000+ at the Verdun Auditorium, which was probably the biggest crowd TNA has done in a long, LONG time, so good for them – but I did catch the PPV and to say that stuff happened on this show would be an understatement.
Though, yes, let’s the big lemon out of the way; Joe Hendry didn’t win the TNA title in the main event six-man elimination match. Honestly, I didn’t really expect him to despite the massive pop he got in the arena, but this was all about Nic Nemeth proving that he’s still got it and while I’m sure people are upset and going “TNA DOESN’T BELIEVE” or something like that, I have a feeling Joe Hendry is going to get a big run somewhere down the line… so long as he isn’t poached by WWE once his contract expires, of course.
In any event, there was a PPV. I have some quick thoughts and here we go…
So I had a choice between watching TNA’s latest PPV (Rebellion) or AEW’s latest PPV (Dynasty) and ultimately, TNA won out. It also helps that I’ve been following Impact for quite a bit and the shows were compelling enough to merit getting this PPV… but not compelling enough for me to check out the couple TNA+ premium shows in between the two major PPV shows for TNA.
In any event, we’ll touch on the Rebellion PPV rather quickly because, truth be told, outside of some returning faces to the promotion, there’s not much to say about this one. It was largely a pretty good show with some good action and that’s about it, really. But let’s dive in, anyway…
