Yeah, I know I’ve been gone and ghastly behind. I’m not going to sit here and promise this and that; rather just tell you that I wanted to get this PPV out because I want to at least review all the PPVs if I can’t do weekly. After this, I’ve got a random Championship Wrestling review to go up because I did it a while ago and didn’t want it to go to waste, and then I’ve got the April 2nd NOAH show as well as WWE WrestleMania XX. From there, I want to try my best to start weekly, but no promises. All I can say is that I’ll try. Before I start though, let me shill the two year anniversary of my site, TheWrestlingVoice.com, which is tomorrow and is sure to be a very big deal. There will be a bunch of updated and new content (including these reviews and our popular cartoons) as well as bunch of surprises so don’t forget to check it out tomorrow. Enough jibber-jabbering, let’s review this damn PPV finally:
A weird, little video opened up the PPV which reminded me of a WWE PPV opener I can’t exactly place. I think it was Survivor Series 2001 or maybe No Mercy 2003, but it doesn’t really matter. It was a weird video, but I kind of dug it which I think makes me weird by association. Anyway, it was called “Stung” and it had this guy in a Sting look watching a hype-up to the PPV with Ultimate X, the NWA title match, and the Eight Man War being accentuated as he mocked all their mannerisms, which was pretty funny to see as he did a lot of the wrestler’s mannerisms in a top hat and black & white video. They then showed clips to highlight Sting’s return as Steve Borden (big seller there) and the guy backed up to the wall and fell down in disbelief. He took off the Sting mask and it’s our favorite simpleton, Eric Young! Man, he really is everything WWE wishes Eugene was. Just goes to show you that if you get out of the cycle of milking characters and situations, things can work out better than expected. The “welcome to [insert PPV name]” video then played and we went right into a shot of the iMPACT! Zone with chants of TNA filling the arena. You just have to love the TNA crowd; they’ll cheer for anything trying to compete with the E at this point. Mike Tenay then hyped up the card and Sting’s return as the very weak fireworks went off. I don’t see why they even bother to waste money on those things as they’ll never be big enough to match WWE’s, which is the only reason they’re doing it. I’d rather TNA save the money, and I don’t know, actually try to make a damn profit?
Grudge Match
Alex Shelley Vs. Jay Lethal
Jeremy Haldeman, who’s a moderator on The Wrestling Asylum (cheap plug), always puts “Grudge Match” above matches with no stipulation for probably the same reason I capitalize the abbreviation of “versus:” we think it looks good. I think I’ll try out his thing and see if it does in fact look good, and then maybe I’ll come closer to being obsessive-compulsive! Before I start on the match, I have to say how much I love the Shelley gimmick, but also how much better it could be portrayed. I love that he comes out with a video tape to tape his own stuff as a play on the fact that he supposedly has this huge video tape library, but I want to see more on the “student of the game” aspect he’s trying to get across and less of the voyeuristic gimmick TNA is pushing on him. Don’t get me wrong, that provided some hilarious segments, but I think the other one could work out so much better as Shelley could be watching tapes backstage and yelling at people for interrupting, and then we could see him take what he learned in the tape to the ring. For instance, here, we could have seen him watching some Ric Flair tape and then have him come out and do some Flair workrate/psychology. It’s really just a thought simply because I don’t want Shelley to become a walking joke when they could easily push him to the moon and have it pay off like it would have in ROH had TNA not picked him up.
I thought this was a pretty good match and a very solid opener which had me a little excited for the rest of the night. It started off with some very fluid opening exchanges between Shelley and Lethal, which is mostly because of Shelley, but it’s not like Lethal stood out like a sore thumb there. They exchanged holds from there with Shelley’s being overly complicated and unique while Lethal’s were generic and out of desperation it seemed. About a minute or two into the match, Mike Tenay basically said “f*** this match,” and went on a tangent to plug the fact that they have Spanish commentary now. That doesn’t piss me off; what does piss me off is for the whole time they plugged this, they put the camera on the Spanish commentary table which had Konnan for money purposes I bet. Shelley could have broken his arm in the ring and we would have completely missed it. Great job, TNA. When the cameras switched back to the ring, they exchanged more holds and then got into a very great and unique submission hold which I can’t even explain. It was basically a leg lock that, after moving around a bit, ended up with them standing on their heads while still tied up as they slapped each other for leverage. Very fun spot here and I think it showed Lethal could hang with Shelley’s offense. From there, they just set the stage for the ending with Shelley grounding Lethal very well and Lethal busting out high impact moves. He had basically a generic Cruiser offense, but it was really well placed and Shelley sold it overly well here that it came off as actually building to something instead of just messing around. All through the match, I was thinking about how great of a heel Shelley was with his subtle tricks and blatant cockiness and I was about ready to call him the only true heel TNA has, but then they started a dueling chant towards the end and shot that equation all to hell. With a crowd like that, I don’t see how TNA can be in disbelief about their TV ratings not transferring over to their PPV buy rates. How in the hell do you expect people to buy a PPV to see a face get revenge on a heel when that heel is getting cheered for beating up the face? It’s bogus.
Anyway, the match told a good story about Lethal being grounded by Shelley for his athleticism and every time he got out of a hold, he went right after Shelley with high impact moves. One thing that surprised me in the match was how good of a job West & Tenay were doing on commentary putting over that story, the impressive mat-work of Shelley, and how great of a rookie Lethal was. If it wasn’t for the blatant plugging at the beginning of the match (which wasn’t exclusive to that one incident sadly), I’d say this was the best commentary on a TNA match in a while. I absolutely love the ending to this match as it really put over Shelley which was good. Lethal was busting out all kinds of work on the neck area of Shelley with suplexes and some high risk movements, but Shelley kept powering out and then hit the Sliced Bread Number 2 (something he picked up in ROH as he took on Bryan Danielson for you out there who don’t know) for the win. At first glance, it was kind of dumb to see Lethal get beat clean on PPV after he’s been getting such big reactions from the audience and getting some momentum, but if you really look at it, they need someone to feud with the X Champ (hopefully Joe) after this three-way feud is over and they’ve got no one left with any credibility. Bentley has been squashed beyond belief. Williams hasn’t picked up an X Division singles win in forever. It pretty much goes the same way for Sabin & Dutt, who are more thought of as a tag team now. Even Lethal is a pathetic challenger considering he was squashed by AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Jeff Jarrett, and others in his first few matches with TNA. Hell, his first match in TNA was a quick squash from Joe that saw him get three moves in. Not really a believable challenger there. Shelley, on the other hand, hasn’t been killed or built up in the past and with this recent Sting stuff going on, TNA could capitalize with him and give him the ball to run with. I’d say to have Shelley go over on Sting on iMPACT! after interference and then have Shelley break away from Planet Jarrett as he climbs the rank to the X Champ which hopefully would involve a clean singles win over someone like Styles. Knowing TNA though, Shelley will be put into Planet Jarrett and lost in the shuffle though so I’m just getting my hopes up.
Winner: Alex Shelley
Star Wrestler: Alex Shelley
Jay Lethal was good in this match and he hasn’t done any less in TNA since appearing, but he’s not even near the level that Shelley is on. Shelley and Joe are probably the only real storytellers left in the X Division right about now, with Daniels jumping in and out ever so often. People like Styles, Dutt, Bentley, and Williams just go out there and do moves and then end the match unless they’re given a big amount of time; that’s not story telling. Even Sabin, who I love, falls into that habit a lot. Shelley, on the other hand, sets the stage even in a freakin’ ten minute match and builds towards a hot finish that’s going to put someone over no matter what the damn finish is. I only hope they capitalize with this and we get Joe-Shelley, Styles-Shelley, or Daniels-Shelley in the future for some good matches and someone else to get some good matches out of Styles.
Tenay & West then hyped up the upcoming matches like the Eight Man War, Ultimate X, and title match. They then started to talk about Steve Borden, not Sting. Now, the first impression of this is that it’s a nice twist to the Sting character that everyone knows and loves; the second is that Sting was brought in to bring in viewers, and which name is going to do that more: Sting or Steve Borden. I really don’t know what to think of this, but God damn if those Shelley cam videos weren’t hilarious!
They then cut back to Jeremey Borash with Team Canada for the first of probably sixteen backstage interviews when half of them could be cut and the time be given to a match. I guarantee you not one match goes over twenty minutes tonight and I’m fairly sure there will only be one or two going over fifteen. What a joke. Anyway, Roode started it off talking about his match with the Naturals tonight which was made because the latter team believes the Canadians screwed them out of their titles. Roode said they didn’t cost them the titles and then D’Amore got on the stick and proved why he’s one of the best talkers in TNA. He started off imitating the Naturals whining and then went on to talk about how they didn’t get screwed, unlike Canadians; the Naturals just didn’t get the job done. He shifted gears and then bitched about Canada being shunned in the World X Cup and said Petey would prove his worth in the four-way tonight. He then continued a promo that most in WWE and TNA couldn’t even get near and started talking about Sting a little bit before Shelley hopped in and said he and Eric Young needed to go look for Sting. D’Amore pulled Young back and told him he had a match tonight, but Young said his “Canadian Danger Sense” was going wild. Good God, lines like that are just freakin’ amazing. He said he had a good idea and was on a mission before hopping out with Shelley as the rest of the team shook their heads and D’Amore told A1 to get ready then. Pretty good segment here, but mostly because D’Amore is a good talker and Young is just hilarious.
Grudge Match
Matt Bentley Vs. Lance Hoyt
So I guess Bentley is now the “Maverick.” Yeah, that’s going to help get him back over and give him back his credibility. At least we don’t have to see that dumb Bentley Bounce anymore. They try to put over the Bentley turn from a few weeks ago on the Xplosion show, but does anyone really care? Well take away one dumb thing and put in another because the Hoyt fan club was back here; I guess Hoyt got drunk and bought everyone drinks at the bar the night before. They weren’t nearly as bad as it has been in the past, but still just annoying. On point, this match wasn’t that bad, but wasn’t that good anyway; the best part about it was that it got significantly better in the middle, but the beginning and end were just kind of pointless. The middle of the match tried to tell the story of the match, but it was really the completely wrong type of story for the situation. Bentley turned on Hoyt and Hoyt should have been filled with rage/hatred looking for revenge; none of this was shown in the match. The match basically had your typical Bentley and Hoyt spots like Traci teasing the opponent, Hoyt trying to fly around the ring, and Bentley attempting to play a heel. I say attempting because outside of his workrate, the guy has absolutely nothing; he’s got no special look, special mike skills, charisma, energy, et cetera. He’s just a guy who nine times out of ten won’t stink up the ring. Anyway, the highlight of the match was a spinning neck breaker off the top rope from Bentley to Hoyt which then led into Bentley working over Hoyt’s neck. It was good work, but didn’t go on long enough to make impression nor did Hoyt even act like his neck was hurt ever. The true mark of a good worker, right? Bentley did do a lot in this match to make Hoyt look better than normal, especially the selling and air he got from a one-handed flapjack. If you need any evidence over the mediocrity of the match, just look at the near fall that would have killed people in their seats if it was done in the main event. Hoyt hit a Pump Handle Slam out of nowhere and the crowd could have cared less for it or even the near fall. Great heat. It went on from there like you’d expect until they got to the end which was entertaining for reasons outside of the match. Borash came out and started talking from the rafters and he was with Young and Shelley looking for Sting. Young said this was his best idea yet and started dropping fliers from the top of the arena which had Steve Borden’s picture on it with the caption of “Have you seen this man?” Traci grabbed one and showed Bentley who said what we all thought: “Who cares?” He then turned around right into a big boot from Hoyt who then picked up the win in a bland match.
Winner: Lance Hoyt
Star Wrestler: Matt Bentley
Bentley may be bland outside the ring, but inside the ring, I rarely have any big problems with him. He’s nowhere near the level of other HBK students like Danielson, London, Spanky, and Cade, but he’s still not a bad worker. Here, he did his best to carry Hoyt, and while it didn’t pan out, he still got a better match out of Hoyt than most others would have. His neck working in the middle of the match and the huge selling he did for the flapjack move were probably the only high points of the match here, so for that I’ll give this nod to him.
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E-mail – douglasnunnally@thewrestlingvoice.com
