10 Worst TNA Gimmick Wrestling Matches
Total Nonstop Asinine.
WWE has promoted their fair share of weird or incomprehensible gimmick matches over the years. The Punjabi Prison Match (imagine a steel cage, only made out of easily breakable bamboo), the Hog Pen Match (pigs, mud, flailing) and any number of festive-themed battle royals stand out as major low points for WWE’s creative team, but next to their TNA compatriots, they’re basically geniuses.
You see, for every King of the Road or Evening Gown Match, WWE also has the Royal Rumble, the Money in the Bank Ladder Match, or the Elimination Chamber, genuinely exciting bouts built around comprehensible stipulations. They add an element of grandeur to a show, and can really turn up the heat on a feud that might otherwise be lacking in spice.
TNA, on the other hand, has long struggled to grasp the evergreen adage ‘less is more’, opting to concoct a series of increasingly bizarre matches that make very little logical sense - and end up being thoroughly uninteresting to watch.
Some of these are worth tracking down, partly to hear Mike Tenay try his hardest to make the stipulations sound slightly sane, and partly to watch genuinely good wrestlers do their best with a thankless stipulation. Others will simply bore you to tears, and should only be viewed by masochists...
10. King Of The Mountain Match
How does it work?
Essentially a backwards ladder match, combined with an elimination match - and there's a shark cage waiting at ringside. The objective is to retrieve a title belt from a TNA official outside of the ring, climb a ladder, and hang it up (before taking it back down again). Before that can be done, however, the wrestler in question must become ‘illegible’ by first pinning or submitting another opponent, whereupon they must spend several minutes in a ‘penalty box’, and cannot pin anyone/retrieve the belt themselves.
Why is it awful?
It’s hard to believe that the King of the Mountain Match stands as one of TNA’s oldest traditions, stretching back to the days of weekly PPVs in 2004. The match stipulation isn’t exactly the worst thing to grace a TNA ring, but when your audience needs to take a three week course just to understand the rules, it hardly makes for accessible viewing.
The complexity of the rules occasionally threw up some dramatic moments (it does feel like anything can happen at any point in the match), but it still felt more like a failed Rube Goldberg contraption than a must-see gimmick match.
It didn’t help that the gimmick, rather like TNA as a whole, lost a lot of its star power over the years. Early KOTM matches included participants like Abyss, AJ Styles, Christian, Sting, Kurt Angle and Samoa Joe, but more recent bouts were firmly rooted in TNA’s midcard after the TNA Television Championship was named after the match stipulation itself.
At any rate, a stipulation match that can be won by a middle-aged Jeff Jarrett (three times, no less) is not a good thing.