With Slammiversary, I was hoping for a lot but got little in return. Don’t get me wrong, the match pitting Kurt Angle against AJ Styles and the X Division Title match of Petey Williams against Kaz were both great matches. However, TNA tried to cram in too much non-wrestling “entertainment” and much of the rest of the wrestling card came off like an episode of Impact instead of a pay-per-view event.
Let me first start off with the entertainment. The wedding of Jay Lethal and SoCal Val went on way too long, especially considering the fact that everyone and their grandmothers knew how this was going to play out. In hindsight, the wedding would have been better to have done on Impact to get viewers to buy into a match between Jay Lethal and Sonjay Dutt. Instead, we had to suffer seeing the inevitable along with a handful of retired wrestlers who have had nothing to do with TNA in the past.
Secondly, we got to see the dreaded Elvis Presley impersonator. Eric Young has been going on for weeks about finding Elvis and this was the big payoff of all of that. An impersonator who was probably one of the worst ones that anyone has seen and that gets driven down to the canvas Awesome Bombed from Awesome Kong. TNA actually took the time to build up Eric Young and his quest to find Elvis for this? That time would have been better used building up some of the undercard matches instead of this waste of time.
Speaking of Awesome Kong, she once again had her $25,000 Challenge. I was hoping for someone to step up and give her a run for her money or to actually defeat Kong, but alas, neither of them happened. As a matter of fact, Kong wrestled two women in a row in less than five minutes and decimated both of them. My one question is why this is on a pay-per-view if it is going to be pointless.
The same can be said for the Team 3D/the LAX tag team match and the Knockout Tag Team match. Team 3D and the LAX have been in several great matches against each other, but I have to say that this one was one of the weaker ones of their feud. The Knockout tag match wasn’t anything to write home about either and looked like it should have been on Impact instead.
If you are charging the fans money to see this, at least make the matches memorable. Unfortunately for Slammiversary, most of the show was unmemorable and unremarkable.
