TNA Bound for Glory 2016 Review

Hey guys! Your boy J-Bass is back here on The Wrestling Classic to review TNA’s biggest event of the year, Bound for Glory. Let’s get into it!

DJ Z © vs. Trevor Lee for the TNA X-Division Championship

For having not been announced and having no build going into it, this match stole the show before the show even began. These two put on one hell of an opener. DJ Z has stepped up in a big way this year. I’ve always liked Zema, but this has been his best year yet with TNA. Lots of great high flying moves but this was far from a spot fest like a lot of X-Division matches have been this year (which I honestly have no problem with). Ultra competitive and even though Lee lost, he still looked great. The finish of the match was devastating too and was a great finish to a really fun match. THIS is how you open a wrestling pay-per-view.

Rating: ***½

Bound for Gold Gauntlet Match for a shot at the World Championship

This went on too long for what it was. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was just a TNA midcard/jobber Royal Rumble. I’m not really insulting anyone in the match (though I can’t stand Grado or Shera), but for a match that will probably have no consequence when it’s all said and done, this was too long. To go along with that, nothing real special happened here. It was just a bunch of dudes trying to toss each other out of the ring, it wasn’t like there were any super memorable spots. I liked Sutter and Spud continuing their feud in this with Sutter going right after Spud. Also, Baron Dax has shown in TNA that he’s infinitely more talented than Baraka who is better as a manager than he is a wrestler. The highlight here was Eli Drake winning which made me very happy.

Rating: *

Mike Bennett vs. Moose

This feud was rushed and unorganic. Bennett since the get go in TNA has been shoved down our throats. He’s good, but not a guy that should be considered a main event star from the outset. Moose is the same. He’s been shoved right into the main event scene without anyone asking for him to be. This match was also incredibly meh. It wasn’t an awful match, it was watchable, but it just wasn’t anything special at all. Nothing noteworthy and the crowd was dead. Bennett hit a damn piledriver and no one cared. That’s not a good thing. I didn’t expect a classic match here, but I was expecting something decent. This fell below my expectations.

Rating: **

Aron Rex vs. Eddie Edwards for the TNA Grand Championship

This was thrown together over the weekend since Galloway was pulled from the match due to injury. That kind of tainted the match with it being the finals of a tournament that Edwards didn’t really earn to be in. It sucks because they did build the Galloway/Rex feud well, but it didn’t get to culminate here. This was weird. I don’t know if I like the Grand Championship concept yet but I don’t hate it. I love Aron Rex but man, he just didn’t look that great here. It was a serviceable match, better than the previous two, but Edwards outshining Rex here didn’t do much good for him. It just sort of fell flat. It partly had to do with the crowd not giving a shit, but the match was kind of clunky and they didn’t mesh that well. Also the lights went out during this match so that didn’t help matters.

Rating: **3/4

The Decay vs. The Hardy’s for the TNA World Tag Team Championship in The Great War

Two words to describe this: Holy shit. I’ll go ahead and say that I HATED this Broken Matt and Brother Nero stuff at the beginning, but after Final Deletion I’ve been loving it. Matt and Jeff have once again found a way to remain fresh and relevant. This was just a lot of fun. From the Side Effect on a barbed wire board covered in thumbtacks, to Brother Nero disappearing and Willow appearing, to Rosemary’s coast to coast, to the throwing of pumpkins, to Vanguard 1’s involvement, to Jeff’s Swanton Bomb off the top of the ladder, this truly was an insane, unpredictable, chaotic, crazy, great war and a match to remember. It’s hard to give something like this a rating because it wasn’t just a match, it was a segment as well. The whole thing was a blast to watch though and I loved everything in this feud coming out in this match (except Senor Benjamin :().

Rating: ****

Maria Kanellis © vs. Gail Kim for the TNA Knockouts Championship

You had that great Hall of Fame segment with Gail Kim earlier in the night and then you have this shit show. Horrible match and it falls on Maria. Maria isn’t a good pro wrestler in the slightest. She never has been. This match relied all on the interference and that wasn’t even entertaining. At least in the past the interference made a Maria match watchable (see Maria vs. ODB at ROH 13th Anniversary). This sucked to watch and it’s too bad this was what Gail was stuck with on TNA’s biggest show this year. The only good thing about this entire segment (pre-match, match, and post-match) was Cody showing up, and it wasn’t event an awesome debut.

Rating: ¼*

Lashley © vs. EC3 in a No Holds Barred Match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship

These two had a very poor match on the first Impact of 2016 but I thought that in this setting in this type of match with the dynamic flip-flopped that they’d put on a better match, and they did. It was intense from the start. Lashley speared EC3 before the match started but EC3 wanted the match to begin anyway. For the first couple minutes this felt like a big fight. I like how they didn’t rely on weapons here. They were still involved but they weren’t the focus of the match. A couple spots in the match made me cringe, like EC3’s TKO on the steps. It didn’t make me cringe because it was brutal, it made me cringe because it was sloppy. You could tell these two tried hard, and they gave us a pretty good main event, but not an amazing one.

Rating: ***¼

This show was okay. Only two matches really worth watching and then two others you could watch if you have the time. I’ll give this show the honor of being better than the worst show in TNA history, Bound for Glory 2014, but that’s about all I can give it. I didn’t mean to trash TNA here as I love TNA, but it’s hard to praise something that isn’t all that great. I didn’t hate the show but I definitely didn’t love it.

Overall Rating: 5.5/10