TNA Should Revive The Bound For Glory Series

 

TNA's signature event Bound For Glory is this Saturday October 26th in Detroit, Michigan. It has actually come to be an exciting card TNA should deliver just as they have done consistently for the past few years. The main event for the event features TNA world champion Nic Nemeth facing off against a man we all believe in Joe Hendry with Frankie Kazarian as the special guest referee. Now this may just be Joe Hendry's crowning achievement to cap off his surge in popularity this year, but that's not why we're here. Last month Hendry and Kazarian competed in a match with the winner becoming the number 1 contender for the world championship. 

While it was a good match, I feel TNA needs to raise the stakes a bit more when it comes to the world championship at their big event. Like WWE has the Royal Rumble, TNA needs something to increase the dramatics of finding out who will compete for the title. They had one before, and now they should revisit it. 

                              That's right they need to bring back the Bound For Glory Series.

Bound For Glory Series was a 12-man tournament that started in the summer of 2011 and ran up to a few weeks before that year's event, it utilized a point system based on how a match was won either via submission or pinfall, DQ or even count out. Each match had a 15 minute time limit and the top four competitors would compete in a mini-tournament finals scenario. The tournament borrowed elements from New Japan's G1 climax tournament (not much is original in wrestling ya know), one thing that made TNA's version unique was that house show matches counted and thus wrestlers gained points from competing on house shows. 

It ran until 2016 when it was abruptly dropped, by that time TNA was shambles behind the scenes so I don't know if it was dropped due to that, or the perceived lack of fan interest. To be fair though fan interest in the product at that time was considerably low. At time's the tournament was convoluted, rules were broken, and it could be hard to keep up with. Some of these issues spoke more to TNA's issues at the time as opposed to the tournaments format. 

Tournaments have made a bit of a comeback in recent years in pro wrestling, they seemed to be occuring all the time during the pandemic. Which I wrote about in 2020, and WWE has revived the King Of The Ring tournament and debuted it's companion Queen Of The Ring. They also have The Dusty Rhodes Classic in NXT, and the recent Twitter (refuse to call it X) exclusive series Speed had it's own tournament. AEW has created great moments and drama with The Continental Classic and The Owen Hart tournament, alongside some here and there tournaments. While New Japan still rules the tournament landscape with G1 Climax, Super J Cup, New Japan Cup and more.

Now that the company has people running it who care, and the turmoil (all companies have some sort of turmoil) is manageable. It's time TNA brings back this tournament and make it their annual declaration to kicking off Bound For Glory season, and determining who get's their shot to be sitting at the top of the mountain.