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The Worst Gimmick Match Concept Ever


Liam O'Rourke

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Scaffold match. Did they draw in the old territories? If so maybe slight justification for it but as a spectacle, they're absolutely shit. They have no correlation to wrestling whatsoever. They're utterly tedious and once you've seen one, you've seen them all. Definitely a gimmick I'm glad is deader than Jim Cornette's career.

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In 2010 there was a match where 4 Knockout's had to obtain keys to unlock boxes. The thing was nobody knew which key opened which box and inside the 4 boxes were a tarantula, a contract for a match of their choice, "the right to perform a striptease or be fired" and the TNA Knockouts Title. The champion was involved in this farce and didn't leave with the belt.

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Anything involving fire (the Inferno match) and anything in the Death Match genre I'm prepared to write off as there being a market for the shock factor and it's still about men that hate each other trying to win through hurting each other. I'll stick my head back in when I have time to write a decent length post about TNA some of the dumbest things I've seen that fly in the face of wrestling logic, the real "who thought that made sense" crap.

 

EDIT - And Zane has just swooped in and taken one of my favourites. Shit.

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TNA were big on these. Already mentioned some of these on this Theead but worth going through.

 

Fight For The Right Reverse Battle Royal: This was the first stage of a No.1 Contender Tournament. The flaws are instant. Picture this. You have wrestlers on the outside battling to get IN the ring. This continues until 7 or 8 guys are in. After that. They have a PROPER BATTLE ROYAL!!!!!!!! Yes. It totally defeats the purpose of the first stage. Granted a match to get in the ring makes no sense at all to begin with, but what was the point in all that? When it gets to two. It's a normal one fall match to determine a winner. The first one won the WON Award for Worst Worked Match of 2006. Easy to see why.

 

Elevation X: Like FFTR, they held 2. Both of these feature Rhino (At least WWE only trademarked the wrong spelling) Don't get me wrong, the production values on the first match are fantastic with lots of focus on concerned fans onlooking. But the structure always shook which was worrying for one false move and the platform was very narrow. Though, on the bright side. TNA got creative and used the structure as the current Ultimate X one.

 

King Of The Mountain: Essentially a reverse ladder match in which one must hang the belt to win. However, things are confusing. To be "eligible" to win the match. You had to get a fall on an opponent. That person goes to the "penalty box" for two minutes. It's possible to go in more than once and after you're eligible. The flaw is it's hard to follow if you've not seen it. And hanging the belt to win makes you want a proper ladder match which would be a bigger and better draw.

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The first thing that immediately came to mind was the 'Asylum' match concept from WCW around the year 2000.

 

I've had vague memories of it over the years but just never bothered googling it or seeking it out...if you watch the match you'll see why.

 

It was a circular cage dropped in the middle of the ring which left absolutely no room for manoeuvring in the already smaller WCW rings and the wrestlers had no access to the ring ropes. I have no idea how many of these they did but I remember Scott Steiner being involved.

 

Absolute toilet.

 

EDIT: Found a link to the match:

 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x330zo_scott-steiner-vs-shane-douglas-u-s_sport

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The Alligator Death Match has to be up there, the thing is shitting itself instead of looking dangerous and does fuck all while Mitsuhiro Matsunaga looks a tad suicidal because he knows how fucking awful the whole thing is. I'm partly mad about this because I bought it on VHS expecting so much more BUT it did include adverts for some Joshi girls doing softcore porn.

 

https://youtu.be/RuFG9ZROcGI?t=5m12s

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King Of The Mountain: Essentially a reverse ladder match in which one must hang the belt to win. However, things are confusing. To be "eligible" to win the match. You had to get a fall on an opponent. That person goes to the "penalty box" for two minutes. It's possible to go in more than once and after you're eligible. The flaw is it's hard to follow if you've not seen it. And hanging the belt to win makes you want a proper ladder match which would be a bigger and better draw.

I watched one of these for the first time last week. It was the Foley/Jarrett/Angle/Styles/Joe match, so along with the above, there was also the bloody ending. "Why did I bother," I said to myself afterwards.

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The King of the Road match from Uncensored 1995 between the Blacktop Bully & Dustin Rhodes. A match in the back of a truck....WHY? Bloody daft and if I remember correctly, both were fired straight after the match for blading. Surely the match wasn't live was it?
 

Heenan ripping the piss out of trailer parks is the only highlight.

 

Still, without this match, Rhodes may have been stuck in WCW mid card for a few more years and Goldust may not have been a thing. So every cloud.

 

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The Triple Cage in WCW has to be on that list as well. So to win you have to climb to the top retrieve the belt come back down and through the door. So logically why wouldn't you just let someone climb to the top and wait by the door for them so you can deck them and just take the title. Stupid WCW logic.

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Has anyone mentioned the TNA electrified cage from Lockdown '07? It was (obviously) not electrified, and they had to play a humming noise of fake electricity in the arena, while the lights flickered and LAX and Team 3D had to sell being electrocuted on contact with the metal, doing fake convulsions and terrible facial expressions.

 

Utter dross.

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The Human Torch match between Sting and Vampiro has to be up there in the worst stakes, completely unneeded

Oh God that was poor. I enjoyed their feud and was looking forward to matches but the matches were short 6 minute tv matches.

 

Air raid mentions death matches. When I first saw some in the 90's I thought Jesus Christ, but when you look back they are dreadful and age so badly. He makes the point about men hating each other and some of these worked so well but it became overdone and people doing them for no reason and far to often. Maybe some wrestlers were doing them to hide the fact they were shit wrestlers. I remember in the Louis Theroux documentary when he visits a US indy who do death matches and one guy does them purely for fun and has scars on his head. Fucking loony.

 

 

The Triple Cage in WCW has to be on that list as well. So to win you have to climb to the top retrieve the belt come back down and through the door. So logically why wouldn't you just let someone climb to the top and wait by the door for them so you can deck them and just take the title. Stupid WCW logic.

I actually quite enjoy this match. If it had just been Jarrett and Page it would have been fantastic.

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Doomsday Cage match with Hogan/Savage basically wandering from cage to cage

Chamber of horrors - just awful.

3 ring 60 man battle royals at WW3's. Too much going on and no real interaction until final 10.

global did a bungee jump match which is pure stupidness if you want to waste 12 minutes of your life watching it

 

Any "loser must retire" match in the modern era. No impact whatsoever and almost always the loser returns. Only exception I can think of in last 10 years would have been Michaels at Mania.

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