10 Worst TNA Gimmick Wrestling Matches

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.