AJ Styles' World Title Wins Ranked - From Worst To Best

8. NWA World Heavyweight Championship - TNA Hard Justice 2005

AJ Styles NWA Champion Hard Justice TNA
tnaasylum.com

I'm putting this one dead last because of how utterly mind-numbing the build up throughout the night was. At TNA's Hard Justice in 2005 AJ Styles defeated Jeff Jarrett for what was his third NWA World Heavyweight Championship, with MMA star Tito Ortiz the man tasked with donning the stripes for the bout.

Styles' win capped off a poor show that came at another crossroads time for the company, as their deal with FSN was coming to an end. The match itself was fine, but was very much a world title win that was forced into seeming like a big emotional victory as opposed to coming with a legitimate big time feel.

Throughout the night Mike Tenay and Don West consistently hyped this up as a huge match, as if we'd never seen the two fight before, Well, we'd already see Styles defeat Jarrett for the belt twice, so it all came off more forced than it probably was.

Ortiz obviously gets involved in the finish too, knocking out Jarrett and allowing Styles to hit the Spiral Tap for the win. Any world title win is a big deal, but this was probably the least exciting of AJ's eight.

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.