10 Weirdest Ways To Create A Wrestling Championship

1. The Strange Tale Of The TNA Legends Championship

The TNA Legends Championship was first created on 23rd October 2008€ by Booker T. He€™d been running a delusional regal €˜African king€™ gimmick for a while, and carrying around a briefcase for a number of weeks. That briefcase was determined to have contained the TNA Legends Championship, and Booker unilaterally (and unofficially), declared the title his. The title was unsanctioned by TNA, meaning it was a vanity prop, like Ted Dibiase's Million Dollar Championship: nonetheless, Booker would defend the fake championship in properly sanctioned matches over the next few months, against Christian and others, until his feud with AJ Styles in early 2009. At this point, and apparently for the first time, the phony title was legitimately on the line. The story ran that Booker T hadn€™t properly read the contract for the match, and had no idea that the small print said he could lose the belt he paid for. What on earth Christian was competing for, months earlier, wasn€™t really made clear. Styles won the Legends Championship at the Destination X pay-per-view on 15th March 2009, and TNA onscreen authority figure Jim Cornette confirmed that, since Booker T's Legends Championship had legally been on the line, the title was now officially a TNA Championship. The title changed hands a few times in 2009 before Eric Young, as leader of the anti-American heel faction The World Elite, took a page from Booker€™s book, and unilaterally renamed the title the TNA Global Championship on Impact on October 29th 2009, saying he would no longer defend it on American soil or against an American wrestler. The Global Championship changed hands several times after this, until falling into the hands of AJ Styles once more, who (can you see a theme here?) unilaterally changed the name of the title to the TNA Television Championship on 29th July 2010. At Slammiversary XI on June 2nd 2013, Abyss would win the TV title for the second time. However, at that point Chris Parks was wrestling both as Abyss and as his brother/split personality Joseph Parks, and neither man ever defended the Television Championship. Why? Because TNA, I€™m afraid. On 3rd July 2014, TNA declared the TV title deactivated on a statement on their website... but on 28th June 2015, they published a video to their Youtube channel introducing the new King Of The Mountain Championship, which would belong to the winner of the reactivated King Of The Mountain match that evening. This, of course, was the TNA Television Championship under yet another new name... this time, a change officially sanctioned by the company. Jeff Jarrett would win that match. The title changed hands once again in a King Of The Mountain match a month later, after Jarrett was forced to vacate the title. However, the next two times the title would be passed on, it would be in a bog standard straight singles match, rendering the whole point of the reactivation and the renaming of the championship completely meaningless. But then, the whole convoluted story of this championship was pretty much totally meaningless to begin with. That€™s TNA for you.