Bang For Your Buck PPV Review: Bound For Glory (2013)

TNA World Heavyweight Championship: A.J. Styles vs. Bully Ray

What Will Happen: The match has its moments, but also relies extensively on brawling around the building and a whole ton of Aces & Eights hijinks. A.J. Styles gives Bully Ray a “taste of his own medicine” much like Chris Sabin did and wins the title in a less-than-clean manner.

This wasn’t the walking brawl that I quickly became terrified of when they announced the match would be no DQ, but the match still had far more bells and whistles than necessary. Knux, Bisch, Dixie, and a timekeeper’s table all tried their best to “elevate” this match and “add drama,” but all they really did was detract from the idea that World Heavyweight Titles are won in somewhat-sacred matches between proud athletes. Bully Ray pulling up the mat and exposing the boards of the ring was cool the first time, but now that it’s become part of his schtick, it’s tiresome and just makes the ring look like a mess. In a moment echoing the low point of the summer, A.J. Styles actually picked up Ray’s hammer and went to use it against him. Luckily, this time he did not succeed, but still – babyfaces should not do that!

Mercifully, TNA booked the right finish to this match, which made up for a lot of stupidity along the way. Following that match, the next step for the TNA World Heavyweight Title should be to get as far away from Bully Ray as possible. After his long run, and this match in particular, it doesn’t seem like he has anything left in the tank that’s, well, good.

Match: +.3

Nick here, to give a contextualization of the numbers:

Easily the lowest rated of the PPVs we’ve covered, this show was everything who saw the build up thought it would be: a really good Roode/Angle match and some other things also. Of course, Dave and I may have different internal scales for what we expect from PPVs, but given Dave’s explanation, I have no reason to believe he’s being too hard on a company that seems like it needs to start doing things like this way better than they have. It appears their Fandango match (Ethan Carter III’s debut) was especially egregious. But this show still had a few good matches , one borderline great match with a bad finish and while not a classic, it appears the main event of the show was at least pushing the company in the right direction and had a good clean finish (#ThanksBattleground). So, I guess, if you bought this, you might not being showing friends, but you’re definitely not hiding the fact that you bought it from family members. See: WCW Sin (or, actually, don’t).

PPV: 1.4 (not counting preshow gauntlet) | Match Avg.: .2

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