When TNA announced it would run a three-month long tournament throughout the summer of 2011 to determine a world title challenger at the Bound for Glory pay-per-view, more cynical viewers questioned whether the promotion really had the ability to pull off such a complex creative task. And while winner Bobby Roode certainly benefitted from the experience, the cynics were largely proved correct.
Contrary to all sporting logic, different wrestlers had a different number of matches in which to rack up points: for example Gunner had 20 bouts, the same as Scott Steiner and Samoa Joe combined. Despite there being no schedule, injured wrestlers (both in reality and storyline) were automatically eliminated regardless of how many points they had already accrued and without addressing the possibility they might be healthy in time for the playoffs. And the scoring system, which only penalised disqualification losses, allowed Bully Ray and Gunner to reach the playoffs despite neither man having a winning record.
Whether it was a rare case of the company learning from its failures, or simply the result of a change of creative personnel, the 2012 Bound for Glory Series was a far more organised and credible tournament. This time round every wrestler fought every other wrestler once, with bonus matches (a 12 man gauntlet battle royale and three four-way stipulation matches) evenly distributed. In the kayfabe world, this time it was a truly fair contest.
The portrayal of the tournament was also drastically improved. Although there were fewer clips of house show bouts, every episode of Impact Wrestling had updates on the results, while on-screen graphics brought the latest standings each week. Mike Tenay and Taz made a point of addressing how different potential outcomes in the televised matches would affect each grappler’s chances of making the final four. This stood in stark contrast to last year when viewers had to search independently run fan sites to keep track of the scores.
The result was that in storyline terms every bout mattered. Winners celebrated, losers looked dejected, and suddenly TNA had more than 60 house show and TV matches that served a purpose without the need for a specific feud or storyline, allowing the creative team to save the more outlandish angles for the rest of the card such as the emergence of Aces and Eights. TNA bookers even managed to keep intrigue right to the end by declaring that whoever topped the table would choose his playoff opponent, thus giving storyline incentive to win even if you had already mathematically secured a top-four slot.
You certainly can’t accuse TNA of inexperience when it come to booking tournaments. At last count the company had promoted 27 separate tournaments in its 10 year history. Many were simple elimination affairs for vacant title or number one contender slots but others were more creative: the Hard 10 tournament where matches were won by racking up weapon shots and table destruction; the poker, limbo and musical chairs based Papparazzi Championship Series; and even two contests where the losing finalist wore a turkey outfit.
Until 2011 however, the company had not run a true round-robin affair: one similar to football leagues where every competitor faces one another in the hope of racking up points. Indeed, a points-based rather than elimination format has been relatively rare across all US promotions, with two high-profile examples both having problems. WCW’s Iron Man and Iron Team tournaments at Starrcade 1989 suffered from having to fit all 12 matches into a three-hour window, a lowlight being the Ric Flair-Great Muta match being allotted less than two minutes.
The AWA’s Team Challenge Series became notorious for a trio of troubles: some bouts were filmed in an atmosphere-free empty arena (supposedly to prevent interference though reportedly because of a lack of fan interest); attempts to liven up affairs with gimmick bouts fell flat, most notably a battle royale where competitors attempted to retrieve a raw turkey from a pole; and the whole affair was stretched out for 10 months such that it became increasingly difficult to keep track of events, while team captain Sgt Slaughter was already on WWE television long before the tournament wrapped up.
Indeed, to find the last successful points tournament in the US, you need to go back almost a century to 1915 when opera house promoter Samuel Rachmann ran two lengthy tournaments at the city’s opera house using several European grapplers who had fled the continent during the war. The second tournament, which stretched into the New Year, was historical for several reasons. It started as a Greco-Roman affair but many later bouts were in the freestyle or “catch as catch can” format which became the norm from this point on. Tournament bouts were limited to 20 minutes, giving a logical explanation for grapplers switching to a faster-paced and crowd-pleasing style.
Although the booking was designed to promote Greco-Roman star Alex Aberg (who won the event) and the up-and-coming Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis, the tournament was best remembered for Mort Henderson appearing as the Masked Marvel. Thought to be the first major wrestling star to appear under a hood, he is credited with turning around Rachman’s fortune at the box office. Unfortunately when Henderson then jumped to a rival promoter an ensuing court case revealed that the tournament outcomes were pre-determined, to the delight of skeptical newspaper writers.
The New York event borrowed liberally from Europe where the idea of a lengthy tournament running over consecutive nights was the most popular promotional format of the era. Though most countries later switched to the now familiar format of promoters running a wider range of venues and champions defending their titles against top challengers in the style of boxing, Germany and Austria stuck with the tournaments.
Instead of having full-time schedules, promoters would block-book a venue for six or more weeks, running six or seven shows a week and bringing in a combination of local and foreign talent. Bremen and Hanover in Germany were the most durable venues, with the latter holding tournaments from 1901 until 2005, minus an understandable break in the 1940s. In a business where the past is often forgotten or downplayed by promoters, there’s something staggering about the idea that the same tournament won at the start of the 20th century by Henrich Weber continued to the days when winners included Doug Williams, Ian Rotten and “Rhyno” Richards.
Wrestling in the tournament was certainly an artistic challenge for the grapplers who took part: appearing before the same crowd for 40 or more straight nights made it very difficult to rely on a familiar routine, while wrestlers also had to quickly adjust to facing a range of opponents of differing styles and abilities.
The format had its upsides as well. Not only did participants have the simple benefit of getting guaranteed work for two or three months if they got booked in multiple tournaments, but they eliminated daily travel. Many took the opportunity to rent a caravan near the venue and adopt a welcome schedule of sleeping in the morning, sunbathing or working out in the afternoon, wrestling in the evening, and taking your choice of wine, women and song by night, particularly when working Hamburg where the wrestling was held near the notorious Reeperbahn.
Tournaments also came to feature heavily in Japan once the country began running regular shows after the war. The first major promotion, the Japanese Wrestling Association, held an annual World Big League tournament from 1959 with top star and promoter Rikidozan winning every year until his death in 1963. The tournament continued until the group folded in 1972 as top stars Giant Baba and Antonio Inoki both left to start their own promotions.
Inoki’s New Japan then ran its own World League each year, billed as a direct continuation. The tournament was later rebranded first as the Madison Square Garden league (the idea being that it featured imports who’d appeared at said venue) and then the International Wrestling Grand Prix. In 1987 Inoki’s win earned him the IWGP championship belt which he then began defending as a traditional title.
After a four-year break New Japan returned to tournaments with a bang as the first G-1 Climax saw young wrestlers Keiji Mutoh, Masahiro Chono and Shinya Hashimoto (collectively the “Three Musketeers”) dominate their more experienced foes. The G-1 Climax became a new annual tradition and, after several experiments with format, is now firmly established with two round-robin groups and the winners meeting in the final.
1991 also marked the beginning of New Japan’s annual junior-heavyweight tournament (after a one-off event in 1988), known first as the Top of The Super Juniors and then Best of the Super Juniors. Again it’s two round-robin groups, though here the top two points-scorers in each group advance to the semi-finals. The use of foreign talent including stars from lucha, the US indies and even the British isles means the tournament brings fresh matches and is often the in-ring highlight of the Japanese calendar.
Giant Baba also brought the annual tournament to his own promotion, All Japan, starting the Champion’s Carnival in 1972. Taking a leaf out of Rikidozan’s book he won it himself seven times in its first ten-year run, though when he revived the tournament in 1991 it became a key tool for building up a new generation of headliners. Although the booking was often hampered by a reliance on 30 minute draws to avoid top stars losing, it became another highlight thanks to the “everyone wrestles everyone” format. A particular highlight came when Akira Taue and Toshiaki Kawada, former rivals turned faction allies, would have their annual battle and fans waited to see if old grudges would boil over.
While the Champions Carnival has lost its prestige with All Japan’s slump, the league tournament concept remains a key component of the Japanese scene. Every major group runs at least one league, with All Japan, New Japan and NOAH all also holding junior-heavyweight and tag tournaments.
Booking a round-robin tournament does bring some major creative challenges however. At the simplest level, bookers need intensely careful planning to get the right combination of results to produce the desired final outcome. This means “upsets” are common in tournaments. Sometimes the underdog wins for a storyline purpose (a reigning champion will often lose in the round-robin stage to set up future title bouts) but on other occasions the result is needed to make the arithmetic work out. A key example is the 1997 Top of the Super Junior tournament where Britain’s Doc Dean — who was otherwise battling to escape last position in his group — took the win over reigning IWGP junior-heavyweight champion Jushin Liger, a result necessary to keep Liger from making the final.
All this hard work can go out of the window when a wrestler is unable to continue in a tournament because they are legitimately injured. Competitors in the Japan tournaments know that quitting through injury is truly a last resort in such circumstances, and when that is unavoidable bookers are sometimes forced into some unwanted results to make sure the final positions are as planned.
To its credit, TNA did find a creative way around the problem of dealing with legitimate injury in 2012 when Pope D’Angelo Dinero was unable to continue. As he only had three bouts left to go, the company ruled that his remaining opponents would not get a forfeit win but would face off in a triple threat bout. The outcome (a win for Robbie E against losers AJ Styles and Rob Van Dam) presumably mirrored the scheduled results in their respective singles bouts with Dinero. In storyline terms the decision meant the three men didn’t get an unfair advantage/lucky break with a forfeit win, though it was perhaps slightly unfair on them because of the lower chances of winning a three-man bout.
Of course, sometimes the opposite is true and a storyline injury can allow for forfeit wins that liven up the scoring without requiring big stars to lose. One such example came in 1994 when an “injury” to Mitsuharu Misawa put him out of the running, allowing perennial rival Toshiaki Kawada to take the crown and set up a legendary title challenge that was undiluted by either man beating the other during the tournament. So credible did Misawa want the injury to appear, the fact that it was bogus was kept from other wrestlers at first, with even Doug Furnas — the man “responsible” — left to wallow in guilt until being let in on the ruse the next day.
Another booking challenge for tournaments is that by their very nature there will be winners and losers: the successes of those who top the table must contrast with the poor performances of those winding up with few points. Historically German and Japanese bookers got round this by giving such slots to tourists who wouldn’t be back again for a while: as Cactus Jack, Mick Foley finished with a Eurovision style nul-points in his group in the 1991 Champions Carnival. Another option was for the lower spots to go to native wrestlers who were either rookies or past their prime, the logic being that even amid a string of defeats they could improve their standing simply by putting up competitive performances.
In more recent years New Japan appears to have become far more cautious with its tournament booking, either to avoid having wrestlers lose too many bouts or as an attempt to maximize the number of wrestlers still in contention on the final day. This year’s G-1 Climax proved a particularly extreme example of this with every wrestler in both groups ending up with a win-loss record of 3-5, 4-4 or 5-3. The problem was that while every grappler avoided extreme embarrassment, nobody got over as being on a run of hot performances: those who upset top names had several losses as well, giving the impression their win was a fluke rather than a breakthrough.
Perhaps surprisingly given its creative history, TNA appears to have done a far better job of keeping those at the bottom of the rankings strong. Last placed Robbie E was the only wrestler portrayed as having an absolute shocker of a performance, but his character helped here: while there’s little prospect of him headlining cards, fans are intended to be annoyed by his presence rather than concerned about him defeating babyfaces.
Fellow straggler Magnus performed poorly (in storyline that is) but the pacing of the tournament meant his biggest impact — arguably costing Samoa Joe the number one slot by giving him an arm injury that caused his shocking tapout to Jeff Hardy — will be the audience’s final memory of his BFG run.
Meanwhile Christopher Daniels strong performances in both promos and matches during the Claire Lynch angle will assuredly have helped hide the fact he was generally on the losing end of tournament bouts. AJ Styles and Kurt Angle both kept in contention late in the tournament while Rob Van Dam was only eliminated in the final round-robin bout. That leaves only Mr Anderson of whom it could seriously be argued the tournament did more harm than good.
As for the top four in the tournament, it can certainly be argued that the results of the playoff bouts didn’t bring maximum booking benefit: it appears Hardy took the win because he was the most popular performer with the audience, something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are certainly credible arguments that either Storm winning (with Robert Roode regaining the TNA title before Bound for Glory itself) or Bully Ray overcoming Hardy in the final and revealing himself as the force behind Aces & Eights might have made better use of the prestige that comes from winning a tournament.
Still, all four men gained in some way. The scoring system firmly re-established Joe’s submission skills, Storm should theoretically have even more heat for his showdown with Roode, Bully Ray was portrayed as more than just a big mouth, and Hardy comes into the biggest match of TNA’s year with far more momentum than if he’d simply won a battle royale or other throwaway match to become number one contender.
If nothing else then, the 2012 Bound For Glory series has given viewers confidence that the current creative team can stick with a story (even if the ending may have been tweaked) and put in the work to make sure even normally throwaway TV bouts serve a purpose and have an impact. If that helps regain the trust of fans that investing time and attention in the promotion’s product is worthwhile, the tournament can only be judged a success.
