Bryan Staebell
TNA Year Eleven: June 11, 2012 – June 2, 2013
The Greatest Man That Ever Lived
Austin Aries had dominated the X division for the entirety of year 10. As year 11 began he set his sights on a bigger prize. Hulk Hogan, now the GM once again, told Aries that he would give him a shot at Bobby Roode’s TNA title in exchange for him handing over the X title. The purpose of the idea was to give the TNA champion something to do while his top contenders spent months competing in the Bound For Glory series. Aries agreed on the condition that every X Division champion be given the same opportunity in the future. James Storm just brought up to Chris Sabin on Impact this past week that if he can win the X title at Slammiversary he has the chance to cash it in for a TNA title shot…so they appear to be keeping the concept despite there no longer even being a Destination X PPV (the show where Aries was allowed to cash in).
Bobby Roode had become the longest reigning TNA champion in company history (technically true…but Jeff Jarrett held the NWA title longer when it was the company’s top belt). He seemed to be on a collision course with James Storm (who was expected to win the BFG series) at Bound For Glory. The Aries title shot was intriguing though because Aries had basically just gone undefeated for a whole year…which made him one of the more compelling challengers they’d set up. They had an excellent match that I’m calling the Year Eleven Match of the Year:
7-8-2013 Bobby Roode vs. Austin Aries
Aries winning was a moment that felt big, but there was always the specter of Roode regaining the title hanging over him. Roode would call out Aries on Open Fight Night with a plan to soften the champ up for their title rematch the next month.
7-19-2012 Bobby Roode vs. Austin Aries
When the title match came around at Hardcore Justice in August, it was do or die time for Roode to get his belt back.
8-12-2012 Bobby Roode vs. Austin Aries
The win cemented Aries as more than just a time holder champion to get through the summer and set him, and not Roode, up to be the defending TNA champion at Bound For Glory.
Sorry about your damn luck
Aries win put them in an interesting spot going forward. If Roode won the title back before BFG to go on with the Storm match…Storm would no longer be chasing down a guy who had held the title for a year…which took a lot of the shine off of it. As it turned out their way around this was to not put the title back on Roode after all set up Roode/Storm as the co-main event without the title involved. But at least they’d finally have their bloody showdown:
10-14-2012 James Storm vs. Bobby Roode
This would be Storm’s sole highlight of year eleven. This match aside, he would continue to be plagued with an inability to win big matches. He’d already come up short once again in the BFG series (which we’ll look at in a moment), he’d actually win a match to become #1 contender after this…only to lose it to…Bobby Roode. As the year continued he’d find himself in less and less important situations. He’d be the patsy for AJ Styles return and is currently injured and, worse, in a tag team with Gunner at Slammiversary. For a guy that looked to be on the verge of becoming the top guy in the company through much of year 10…year 11 has been a disaster.
A worthy series
After the inaugural Bound For Glory series left much to be desired, they revamped the concept for the second try. And by “revamp” I mean “made it make sense”. Everyone got to wrestle in the same number of matches this year for starers. And the point of the tournament was to get into the top 4 heading into No Surrender where there would be a one night tournament to crown the series winner. That the same thing happened in the first series was forced by a tie in the standings…but someone realized that having two guys have a match to crown a winner was a million times better than counting up total points in the end. Oh…and something kind of amazing happened during the BFG series this year…Jeff Hardy abandoned his “float through shows and collect paycheck” mentality and started being really really awesome. Here are a couple of matches that highlighted the series:
7-5-2012 Jeff Hardy vs. James Storm
8-12-2012 AJ Styles vs. Kurt Angle vs. Samoa Joe vs. Christopher Daniels (ladder match)
8-30-2012 Jeff Hardy vs. Kurt Angle
The final 4 came down to James Storm, Bully Ray, Jeff Hardy and Samoa Joe. Hardy would beat Joe and Bully would beat Storm to advance to the finals. Before the match Aces and 8’s conveniently injured Hardy to give Bully Ray the easy series win. When Hardy hobbled down to compete anyway and pulled the upset, he was Bound for Glory while Bully Ray had to come up with a new idea to get to the belt. Aries and Hardy had a tremendous match to end Bound For Glory. The crowd totally bought Aries as the legit top guy in the world here.
10-14-2012 Austin Aries vs. Jeff Hardy
A bad year
Unfortunately for AJ Styles the bad year that began at the end of year 10 continued into year 11. Unfortunately for everyone else…it now included Claire Lynch. As it turned out AJ had not been having an affair with Dixie Carter, the two of them had been supporting a crackhead named Clair Lynch who claimed to be pregnant with AJ’s baby. How they went this far down the rabbit hole I’ll never understand. In the end AJ was found innocent of everything and the only people that came out of this not looking bad were Christopher Daniels and Kazarian, who managed to be extremely entertaining despite being given the worst material in all of wrestling.
Fortunately when they got away from terrible storylines and into the ring…AJ Styles was still phenomenal.
7-8-2012 AJ Styles vs. Christopher Daniels (last man standing)
9-9-2012 AJ Styles and Kurt Angle vs. Bad Influence
10-14-2012 AJ Styles and Kurt Angle vs. Bad Influence vs. Hernandez and Chavo Guerrero
Heading into Turning Point Hulk Hogan had the idea for a match where the winner would become #1 contender and the loser would not be allowed to challenge for the TNA title until at least Bound For Glory 2013. James Storm would pin Styles to put another dagger through Styles as he continued his descent.
11-11-2012 AJ Styles vs. James Storm vs. Bobby Roode
The real final blow would be delivered the following month at Turning Point when Styles lost to his arch-nemesis Daniels in what was billed as their “final encounter” to see who “the better man for all times” was. Despite having a record of like 1-40 against Styles…Daniels beat him with a Styles Clash and AJ disappeared for several months.
Hardy is on something good for a change
The awesome run that Jeff Hardy started in the BFG series carried over into this title reign. He had very good to great matches every time out. This was a far cry from what he had been delivering in TNA during his various stops with the promotion. It wasn’t until this run that TNA finally got the good Jeff Hardy that seemed to save his best for whenever WWE let him back in. His contract was actually coming up during his title run, and although his hard work would have maybe led you to believe he was gearing up for another WWE return, he decided to re-sign with TNA for another couple of years. Hopefully years spent having the quality of performances he would put on here:
11-11-2012 Jeff Hardy vs. Austin Aries (ladder match)
1-13-2013 Jeff Hardy vs. Bobby Roode vs. Austin Aries
What’s really been going on
Of course the big story of year 11 fittingly began on the very first show OF year 11. On the first Impact after Slammiversary Sting was in the ring to talk about being the first man chosen for TNA’s hall of fame when a group of masked guys attacked him. This began the now year long saga of the Aces and 8’s. Instead of rehashing an article I’ve already written…here’s the videos from Impact where Bully Ray explains it for himself:
Here are the key matches/moments from the story:
10-14-2012 Sting and Bully Ray vs. Aces and 8’s
Bully Ray/Brooke Hogan wedding
3-10-2013 Jeff Hardy vs. Bully Ray
4-11-2013 Jeff Hardy vs. Bully Ray (Full Metal Mayhem)
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Despite not registering anything memorable enough for me to go searching for a video of…the X Division had a pretty interesting year.
Chris Sabin returned from injury at the very beginning of year 11 only to immediately injure himself again and miss almost the entire year (his second in a row) before finally returning just this past month.
Kenny King very publicly left Ring of Honor for a shot in TNA which eventually would pay off with an X title win and a featured role in the company.
RVD spent much of the year as X division champion before his contract ran out. He put over King clean on his way out. It’s still unknown where RVD will end up and I still expect to see him pop back up in TNA sooner or later.
TNA changed the concept of the X division nearing the end of the year by making every X division match a 3 way. In title matches the champion and the person not defeated move on to the next title match, while the loser must re-qualify for the third spot in the next contender’s 3 way. The point is supposed to be to cycle in old guys returning (Sonjay Dutt, Petey Williams, Suicide) and new guys being introduced (…I’ll get back to you) and is fine some of the time…but completely hinders any actual feud from getting going. Chris Sabin has the ultimate babyface story of missing 2 years of his career to fight his way back to the title…and he’s stuck in 3 way matches every time. They even had a segment on Impact where he and King faced off to build to a future match…and then that match also had Petey Williams in it.
Sabin will get another chance to take home the X title (and then have the opportunity to trade it in for a TNA title shot) at Slammiversary when he, Kenny King and Suicide (this time portrayed by TJ Perkins) battle in the Ultimate X.
After all that you want me to fall off of the fucking wires?
Dos Stereotypicos
Chavo Guerrero arrived in TNA early in year 11 and immediately began doing what he does best…making things not as good as they should be. He was put into a team with Hernandez that isn’t nearly as good as LAX and they have captured two TNA tag titles. Both were done in places where TNA figured the crowd would love them for being Hispanic (Phoenix and Corpus Christi) and neither time did anyone care. They spent the year having matches with Daniels and Kazarian (who are great), AJ Styles and Kurt Angle (who are great) and the new team of Austin Aries and Bobby Roode (who are great). As expected none of the encounters were as good as you’d think they would be due to the Chavo of it all. So they aren’t over, don’t have matches at the level of their opponents and always win. On the plus side the new arena set up has a ramp to the ring at all the events so Hernandez can no longer try to kill himself on the dive over the top to the outside spot. On the negative side every match he doesn’t break his neck is one more match he has to have teaming with Chavo Guerrero.
Hernandez and Chavo will defend their titles at Slammiversary against three teams this time. Bad Influence, Austin Aries and Christopher Daniels, and James Storm and random tag team partner Gunner. They aren’t in Arizona or Texas…so the good news is they’re likely to lose.
Overhaul
Dixie Carter had mentioned in interviews for a while that she wanted to drop the number of PPVs down from 12 a year to…a number smaller than 12 a year. They finally got around to doing it in year eleven. Following the Genesis PPV in January the company cut the live PPV events down to a whopping 4. Genesis in January, Lockdown in March, Slammiversary in June and Bound For Glory in October. The last three make sense since they’re the “big ones” for the company. Genesis seems to have made the cut just due to timing.
In order to fulfill their contracts with foreign TV that includes the cut 3 hour PPVs every month, TNA started taping a bunch of 3 hour themed shows in the Impact Zone. They air them on the cheap as “One Night Only” PPVs on Friday nights in the US. Two of these aired in year 11 (an all X division show and a Battlebowl knockoff show) both were unmemorable. Year 12 will see at least 7 more of these (a hardcore theme, a knockouts theme, a World Cup theme, a 10 year reunion show…airing in year 12, a tag tournament and a tournament for former TNA World Champions).
They took the money they were no longer losing on the live PPVs no one was buying and decided it was time to take Impact on the road for good. They let the lease run out on the Impact Zone and started running live every other Thursday (and taped the next week from the same location afterwards). They quickly found that crowds were way too burned out by the end of the 4 hour shows so they changed the tapings to start at 7 without taking commercial timeouts and shaving an hour off of the total taping time.
Impact was moved to 8 o’clock to allow the debut of Bellator MMA to start at 10 immediately after. Impact never got its audience to fully join them an hour earlier so ratings dipped a bit. The problem solved itself when Bellator ended its first season and Impact was moved back to 9 for the Slammiversary go home show.
The new AJ Styles
Despondent over his terrible run of luck in the last year, AJ Styles wasn’t seen around TNA for months. When they finally found him he had grown a beard and was in need of a haircut. When he finally made his return to Impact he chased away old rivals Daniels and Kaz before decking James Storm as well. At this point everyone became obsessed with figuring out whose side Styles was on…despite it being pretty clear that he wasn’t on anyone’s side. He beat Storm in his return match with a new ankle lock or heel hook submission (still not sure…he’s only used it once) and then was wooed by Hulk Hogan, Aces and 8’s and even Daniels and Kaz.
As the year ended everyone finally got the message when he helped Aces and 8’s take out Kurt Angle…and then took out the Aces and 8’s himself. Of all the people in the company AJ Styles is the one to watch in year 12. The stipulation that he can’t get a TNA title shot until at least Bound For Glory 2013 makes him the prime candidate to win the BFG series (though James Storm was in that spot last year and we saw how that worked out). The series gives him the opportunity to get over his new finisher and be on a nice hot streak heading into the show. The question going forward is how long are they planning on keeping him a tweener.
The good news in all of this is that AJ Styles is an awesome wrestler who will finally be getting back to actually wrestling starting at Slammiversary against Kurt Angle. Angle, himself, has been used less and less in recent months but is ready for his next run. The BFG series will provide both of them the opportunity to get back to it.
Will wrestle for food
Wrap up
TNA did an awesome British Boot Camp show with 4 wrestlers (well…2 guys and twins) competing in a reality show for a TNA contract. Jeremy Borash produced it and all 4 of them were given more character and personality than almost anyone on the roster. Rockstar Spud won and then joined all the Gut Check winners in disappearing forever.
Mickie James and Velvet Sky both returned to the knockouts division on pretty much the same day. Sky got the title right away and Mickie beat her for it at the end of the year. Mickie may have turned heel but we’ll have to wait for the follow up to be sure. Sky is terrible.
Taryn Terrell (Tiffany) was brought in as the official ref of the knockouts division. It didn’t take long for her to run afoul of Gail Kim and become a wrestler. The two will have a “Last Knockout Standing” match at Slammiversary. I assume because it’s a PPV and they figure everything needs a stipulation.
Abyss returned a year after his brother stopped looking for him. Joseph Park has become a regular wrestler who doesn’t know that he’s actually Abyss. Whenever he bleeds he freaks out and kills his opponents with Abyss moves. I have no idea when they’re planning on paying off this storyline…but the more Park wrestles the less interesting it becomes. He has his first chance at winning a title against Devon (TV champion…there’s no reason for you to have known that) at Slammiversary.
Gut Check continued to be completely ridiculous with TNA passing on good prospects because of their own inane rules. With the BFG series coming up after Slammiversary one of the Gut Check winners will get a big opportunity to join the main roster. Jay Bradley will face Sam Shaw at Slammiversary to determine who moves into the series. Shaw has the most potential of all the people they’ve picked up…so this should be the start of something good for him…but we’ll see.
Jeff Hardy was given some time off to sell “injuries” from Bully Ray in their Full Metal Mayhem match. He’s set to return at Slammiversary as the partner of Samoa Joe and Magnus against DOC, Wes Brisco and Garrett Bischoff in perhaps the most lopsided amount of talent on opposite sides of a 6 man tag ever.
And the final match of TNA year 11 will see TNA Champion Bully Ray take on Sting in a No Holds Barred match. If Sting loses he can never challenge for the TNA title again. It raises a lot of questions about how long Sting is planning on sticking around, whether Hogan is going to try and work a match of some sort with Bully Ray at BFG (if he is, Bully needs to drop the title before then due to the BFG series) and whose side Brooke Hogan will end up on for the short term.
They’ll also be announcing the second inductee into the TNA hall of fame. It should be Jeff Jarrett but it probably won’t be.
In the end, thanks to Austin Aries, Jeff Hardy, Bully Ray and Bad Influence, TNA year 11 was actually one of their more entertaining years. With year 12 looking to be a year of redemption for AJ Styles…there should be some good stuff on the horizon. It really depends on how much in the future is going to be Hulk Hogan feuding with everyone instead.
