TNA News: Major Issues With TNA Bound For Glory In Japan, What Happened Is Absolutely Nuts
TNA has done some really weird things in the last year. Many feel as if it is a less successful version of WCW at this point. This has led to many people jumping ship, and others refraining from going there at all. TNA’s Bound for Glory PPV was said to be the biggest event of the year. It is TNA’s WrestleMania, after all. Obviously TNA wanted to put on a good show and give us a big reason to watch. Did they though? Absolutely not.
What we know now, TNA did pretty much nothing to give fans a reason to watch. According to The Wrestling Observer, the card wasn’t even finalized until two weeks before the PPV was set to take place. While this normally wouldn’t be an issue, TNA tapes all of their shows for a month within a few days. Meaning, TNA could not properly promote the card. Not one match was spoken of until the Wednesday BEFORE Bound for Glory was set to take place.
With the exception of the main event, Great Muta and Tajiri vs. Great Sanada and James Storm, no matches had any television build-up or angles. The go-home show was filled with a whole lot of nothing and no build to the show. Unless you were a TNA mark, you were not going to be sold on watching Bound for Glory the following Sunday. Mainly because TNA didn’t sell it to fans well enough. Barring the main event, really nothing was promoted on the go-home show.
TNA killed off the Bound for Glory series, which was a really good concept for them in recent years. This made no sense to many within TNA. The only real indication why TNA did so was due to the loss of several stars, many of whom would have been in the tournament. TNA also took Bobby Lashley and The Wolves off of the show late despite advertisements that they’d appear. They did so due to timeline issues. Due to differences, three of the company’s biggest stars were off of the show. On top of this, neither the World Title or Tag Titles were defended. This on TNA’s BIGGEST EVENT OF THE YEAR! Yes, there were different champions in the real-life timeline… but come on, TNA.
This is why the taped Impact Wrestling shows are horrible for the company. They work for scheduling. However, with little to no live events right now… why is TNA in a rush to tape shows? They have until the end of the year with Spike TV, so there is no rush for them to get programming out. It is a weekly show. They could have taped weekly leading up to the Bound for Glory PPV, which would have cut down on a lot of problems. It makes no sense to not have the World Title off of the show. It is the biggest part of the company!
According to The Wrestling Observer, issues happened with the Knockouts and X-Division Title as well. Dave Meltzer of the Observer claimed the following.
“You don’t put the title with the most interest, and the other title that TV has been built around the past two months, on the show, but you ignore the very reason, and spend the money to fly out people for two other title matches.
In the X title, it actually worked out that they had the golden opportunity to rectify a problem. Samoa Joe was injured at the tapings, so couldn’t lose the title to Low Ki. So at Bound for Glory, Joe, Low Ki and Kaz Hayashi were in a three-way match for the title. They could have had Low Ki go over and win the title, so he’d have credibility as champion by beating Joe. Granted, it would require slight editing of a few TV shows after, but Low Ki was supposed to beat Joe in the first place and now they could do it. Instead, they had Joe win, and not only that, but he choked out Low Ki to do so. So now, the guy not under contract has a clean win on the champion who is under contract, never loses the title, and his contract is over with the guy who lost essentially handed the title.”
So confusion was not the only issue in the end for TNA, but rather issues regarding decisions for the entire program.
The added issue for the show still doesn’t end there. Bound for Glory was in Japan, so one would think that most in the audience would be Japanese. Oh no, there were far more Americans there. There were more English chants than Japanese.
Wrestle-1 is not a big promotion yet in Japan. All-Japan and New Japan Pro-Wrestling are both bigger there. That means that Wrestle-1 was using this as a launching pad. It helped them, but did nothing for TNA Wrestling’s brand. How could it? Wrestle-1 could only do so much to promote the show in Japan as well. The show took place in what looked like ECW’s old Bingo Hall. Something you’d expect to be different in Tokyo, of course.
To make matters worse for TNA, Bound for Glory did the lowest numbers of any regular PPV in company history. There are obvious, glaring reasons why this is. As for the show wrestling wise, many who watched or attended liked this. Japan does have good wrestling, and combined with the TNA stars facing them, the show was good from that stand-point. The issue is the tree falling in the woods scenario. If no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Sure, TNA might have put on a relatively good show. While it had tremendous flaws, the wrestling content was there.
The problem is, TNA did a poor job promoting it Now, many wonder if this is the last PPV-style show TNA will ever do. If so, it would be a shame. However, noting the several issues written above, TNA did it to themselves. They are literally living out a “shake my head” meme at this point.
[IMG Credit: wrestlingitalia.it, whatculture.com, impactwrestling.com]
