10 Times TNA Went Way Too Far

8. The Worst Gimmick Matches In The World

Terrible, terrible gimmicked matches aren€™t endemic to TNA, but they€™re the reigning, defending champions of badly thought out, dull gimmick matches. Feast Or Fired and its women€™s equivalent of the Locked Box Challenge are just overbooked versions of Money In The Bank. Feast Or Fired gives four men winning briefcases, but one of them contains a pink slip and results in the €˜winner€™ being fired. Why a promotion would book a match where one of its supposedly valued performers would be sacked for winning is beyond anyone. The one-off Locked Box Challenge was actually worse: adding a weird elimination aspect to the action, one of the boxes contained the Knockouts title itself, while another contained a title shot, a third contained Knockouts champion Tara€™s pet spider Poison, which had been stolen from her€ and the fourth had a contractual obligation to strip in the middle of the ring. Tara opened the box and got her spider back, but suddenly realised that this meant that, despite winning the match, she€™d lost her title without being pinned. Meanwhile the idea that a legally binding contract would be used to force a female talent €“ who€™d just won a match - to take her clothes off on television is just creepy as all hell€ and why would anyone else get excited about winning someone else€™s tarantula? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi9KP6aQmW4 The Reverse Battle Royal, where wrestlers wage pointless war on one another to get into the ring, is actually stupider than it sounds. Cuffed In The Cage involved several tag teams competing in a steel cage elimination match where the losing team is cuffed to the inside of the cage. The S&M (Sadistic Madness) affair from way back when proves that it€™s not just modern TNA that sucks this badly €“ it€™s a four-on-four where no pinfall or submission will count until all eight men are bleeding. And then there€™s the daddy of them all: the King Of The Mountain match. Five men compete for the world title, and a pinfall or submission makes the pinning man eligible to win, while the pinned man gets to spend two minutes in a time out cage until he can rejoin the action (whereby you get to fight or collude with any other pinned man who might also be languishing in there). Once you€™re eligible to win, you run to a roving referee and grab the belt from them, using the ladders to try and hang the belt above the ring. When the belt is in play, any eligible wrestler may try to hang it. If you drop the belt, and no one else eligible immediately grabs it, the belt is returned to the roving referee and you carry on. If that actually makes sense to you, then you probably need a blood test to confirm whether you€™re actually a Jarrett.

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Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.