The 2008 411 Year End Wrestling Awards (Part 3)

Posted by James Thomlison on 01.07.2009

Who gets a trophy today?

Welcome to Part 3 of the 411Mania.com 2008 Year End Wrestling Awards. If you haven't already, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2!


REVIEW: Before we get to it, let's take a look at the winners we've already announced to this point:

Announcer of the Year: Jim Ross – WWE (57 points)

Rookie of the Year: The Osirian Portal (Ophidian & Amasis) – CHIKARA (38)

Breakout of the Year: Tyler Black – ROH/FIP (38)

Comeback Wrestler of the Year: Chris Jericho – WWE RAW (86)

Disappointment of the Year: Hardy's again suffers Wellness issues – WWE (50)

Best Indy Show of the Year: Supercard of Honor III – ROH (21)

Free TV Match of the Year: Jeff Hardy vs. Umaga – Steel Cage Match – WWE (42)

Worst Story/Surprise of the Year: Jeff Hardy not only violates Wellness, but then suffers even further setbacks by having things like his house burn down and his dog die – WWE (61)

Story/Surprise of the Year: Ric Flair's retirement angle culminating in his retirement ceremony on the 04.01.08 edition of RAW – WWE (55)

Worst Feud of the Year: Black Machismo vs. Sonjay Dutt – TNA (64)

Feud of the Year: Shawn Michaels vs. Chris Jericho – WWE (76)

Worst Storyline of the Year: Vince McMahon's NO CHANCE! – WWE (39)

Storyline of the Year: Fallen: The Trials of HBK – WWE (49)

And now that we have that out of the way…





Today's Dark Match Award:

Spot of the Year: Naomichi Marufuji reverses the Briscoe Brothers' Springboard Doomsday Device into a Shiranui while in mid-air (NOAH) - 30 points








Honorable Mentions: IWA-MS (5 points), ROH (1 point), NWA (5 points)

3rd Place: Pro Wrestling Guerrilla () - 7 points

2nd Place: Hulk Hogan's Celebrity Championship Wrestling () - 34 points

And your winner is...:



Total Nonstop Action () - 47 points


Daniel Wilcox: Oh man, where do I start? While I don't think TNA treated us to anything as bad as Pacman Jones this year, they certainly gave us a whole lot of crap that came close. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at a TNA booking meeting, because those things must be one hell of a party, complete every kind of drug and liquor you can think of. It's become cliché to mock TNA for their ridiculous booking decisions but that's because they make so many of them. We can talk about all of the ridiculous gimmick matches they've subjected us to – Drinking Championship Series, Fish Market Street Fight, Stand By Your Man Strap match, Cuffed in the Cage, Queen of the Cage, Deuces Wild Tag Tournament, Makeover Battle Royal, Black Tie Brawl and Chain match, Ladder of Love match, Feast or Fired – I could go on. One has to wonder how these things were ever allowed to come to fruition. And then of course, there's all the ridiculous skits and character makeovers. Stone Cold Shark Boy anyone? Super Eric? The Prince Justice Brotherhood? Remember AJ at Granny's house? "Sarah Palin"? Suicide? The fact that Christopher Daniels is still stuck in that Curry Man gimmick? It's surprises me that people are surprised that people consider TNA a joke.

The worst part of it is, TNA is preventing themselves from succeeding by putting some of their most talented performers in ridiculous gimmicks, which in turn prevents the fans from taking them seriously. Thankfully AJ Styles has recovered from his lovesick sheep gimmick and has regained some credibility, but you have to think that not everyone will do the same. If TNA wants to be considered as a serious alternative to WWE, they have to take themselves seriously before anyone else will. It's case of learning to walk before you can run, because if TNA can't use their most talented people correctly, how can they expect to get the best out of the rest of their roster? It just seems that for every one angle or wrestler they book well, there's a Feast or Fired match or a Stone Cold Shark Boy skit waiting right around the corner.

Jeremy Thomas: Someone's going to hate us for this, I know it. That's okay, though. I won't deny that in 2008, TNA did a lot of things right. They gave us a couple great storylines, such as the Main Event Mafia vs. the Frontline. They gave us a lot of good matches, too. They hit their all-time ratings high, even. All in all, 2008 has to be considered a pretty tolerable year for Total Nonstop Action.

"Wait a minute," I hear you say. "Isn't this supposed to be WORST Fed of the Year?" That's quite right, dear viewers. Because let's be frank…while TNA gave us some good stuff in 2008, they gave us a whole, big bloody mess of very wrong. From January all the way through to December, Dixie Carter and the Jarretts' promotion proceeded to make wrestling fans grind their teeth in frustration at all the wasted potential, stupid angles, retarded gimmick matches and just flat-out mistakes they made. Don't believe me? Sit back and relax, my friends, as I take you through the wrongs that TNA put us through over the last twelve months.

Start back at Final Resolution, the first Pay-Per-View of the year. We had the beginning of things that just didn't work, from Eric Young and James Storm's silly drinking contest that took up way too much time—although hell, thirty seconds of this on Pay-Per-View would have been too much time. Instead, we got it spread out in three separate and equally stupid segments that resulted in Storm winning. Alongside this we got a six-man Ultimate X match for possession of the X-Division title, a weak match that watered down the very concept of Ultimate X. Instead of saving one TNA's most unique matches for something special, they used it to inject something interesting in order to save the match and the silly angle behind it, and the stip suffered as a result.

Of course, that was just the beginning of the year…we were just getting started. Barely a month later TNA would set the bar for Worst Match of the Year by putting poor Kaz, mired in a pointless and stupid feud with Black Reign, in a Rat on a Pole match. I know this match will be talked about elsewhere, at great lengths and with a lot of deserved hatred, but I'll just say that it reaches new levels of inanity when you take a man like Kaz, who's gotten huge wins during his run in TNA, and put him in a match this retarded. Meanwhile, the drinking contest had blossomed into a full-blown drinking championship. It was at times like this that I felt I deserved a title myself for getting through some of this stupid crap.

I'll be honest, I could keep going blow by blow with all the bad things that have run through TNA this year, but by the time I was done I would probably have written the longest article 411Mania has ever seen. Hell, I've been summarizing and skipping stuff already, so let's just get down to it. They botched Samoa Joe's title run, and botched it badly. This was a guy who fans were frothing at the mouth to see get the title and they took forever and a day to get it done. Joe had choked time and time again before finally winning the gold in April at Lockdown. They would then put him in bad situations time and again where he looked weak, including the epically dumb "You can't beat Booker T" mess that ran through Victory Road and Hard Justice, part of which was overshadowed by Sting's impending return. Meanwhile, we had the insanely bad Deuces Wild Tournament which did no one any good. Even the Knockouts Division started to suffer, as we got the absurd Knockout Makeover Battle Royale in which the ladies were portrayed as spoiled brats and poor Roxxi got her head shaved. All in all, this is just a sampling of the stuff we've had to endure.

The biggest problem with TNA is that it has all the tools to succeed. It has the talent, it has the following, and it has everything it needs. If it would just stop doing so much stupid crap then it could easily take off into the stratosphere. We get a reputation for hating on TNA, and that's simply not true. We want it to succeed, and nothing would make us all happier if they did. In order to do so, however, they have to take the next step and cut out all the bush league stuff. When they do, they'll finally earn their way off the top of this ignominious list.

Mathew Sforcina: OK, here's the thing. From an objective point of view, this is a rather silly award, in that I'm sure you can find some indy fed out there that ran a few shows this year where no match broke 1/2 * and was filled with bad wrestling and stupid, boring interviews. I think most of the voters realise this. But TNA is a different kettle of fish. TNA should be awesome. You have some of the best wrestlers on the planet, some of the biggest names, some of the most charismatic, some of the best talkers, some of the best females, a great production guy, a decent set up, committed leaders, good agents and a guy on staff who was 'responsabe' for saving the WWF and bringing about the hottest period in Wrestling history. How can that not work, how can that not lead to greatness?

Well, for the most part, TNA managed it. A lot of it involved Black Reign, some of it Samoa Joe, and all of it was mismanagement and failure to utilize the talent. There is no reason that TNA cannot be, while not a step for step rival to WWE, a solid alternative product that makes money and slowly grows. TNA should work. Recently it's made some strides towards that goal, but constantly overreaching, constant rehashing of WWE, constantly short matches and bad angles, just constant bad moves. TNA gets this award because while it's hardly the worst company in history, it's certainly one of the most mismanaged. TNA has to get it's stuff together, and work out just what it CAN do, and do it. Until then, it'll be this... entity that everyone wants to see work, but never will. Being in the black is all well and good, but when you're the alternative, you have to be an alternative, and you can't be one if you don't get things right. Here's hoping next year we do get to give this award to some small time garbage indy fed...

James Craig: It is only to easy to join in the pile up on TNA. I, for one, actually like TNA and have, at different intervals, felt that they have produced a superior product to that of the WWE. This isn't always the case, and this year was a tough year to be a fan of the promotion. It seems for every step forward that TNA takes, they manage to find a way to take two steps back. Much of the blame for what is wrong with TNA seems to get pointed at Vince Russo, and I do think he deserves his share of the blame, but it isn't just him. TNA's problems seem to be systemic, coming straight from the top and working their way down through the booking team and ultimately to the active roster.

One problem TNA has always had, but seem to only run with this year was a tendency to focus mainly on one aspect of the promotion and almost push other things to the side, or focus on the wrong things. If the Knockouts division takes off, then the Tag division suffers from a lack of attention or the X-Division. Actually the X-Division hasn't seemed to matter since 2006. It is really hard to get behind a company that consistently has false starts in pushing talent (Kaz and Tomko), pushing unsigned talent or using some talent in truly wrong ways (Joe as a whiney and very unlikable champion in his very first and way over due run).

TNA needs to get over this tendency to over book ppv's with gimmicks. This also isn't something new to the promotion, but again, it seems to have gotten worse this year. This type of booking burns a fan out, and really takes away from the special feeling the "big" gimmick matches are supposed to have. Overuse of gimmick matches isn't the only problem in this regard, but there are so many goofy matches, or unnecessarily complicated matches that it is hard to take TNA seriously. This isn't to say that the competitors don't do the same, but the sheer volume of which TNA goes about this is what puts them over the top.

There are god points to the promotion, and it always seems that the promotion is jussst on the verge of overcoming its' own goofy and self destructive decision making. The year 2008 just seems to have been a year where a perfect storm formed over TNA and didn't let up all year. The glints of light that came through this year can leave fans with hope for 2009, but for 2008, TNA just couldn't overcome itself and as a result, was this year's worst fed.





Honorable Mentions: Mike Adamle's Farewell Speech (WWE, 6 points), AJ Styles at his Granny's (TNA Impact, 01.03.08 – 16 points), Larry Sweeney forces Bobby Dempsey to rape Allison Danger (ROH 6th Anniversary Show, 02.23.08 – six points)

3rd Place: Booker T BURIES AJ Styles (TNA Impact, 05.01.08) - 17 points

2nd Place: THE SHITTY TNA SLAMMIVERSARY WEDDING (06.08.08) - 18 points

And your winner is...:



McMahon's Million Dollar Mania, culminating in Vince getting buried as a result of shoddy workmanship and/or sabotage (WWE) - 24 points


Jarrod Westerfeld: This one is a bit over my head, to be honest, because this wasn't exactly the promo in the general sense that we associate with wrestling. This was a business promotion to try and gain viewership on a gimmicked hook of "watch and win money" which is typically looked down upon as a last ditch effort to fix a problem that other, more conventional ways, could have salvaged them. I am befuddled with the sheer stupidity of Vince McMahon to think that he could gain the necessary viewers to make the USA network happy by giving away portions of the profits that he collects every quarter when what we fans have really been wanting is better wrestling, stronger stories and character development and a overall better product. Thanks Vince, you went from the iconic genius of this mother fucking industry to the dumbest asshole in the turn of $4 million dollars being handed out, great move – Jeff Jarrett is jealous you stole his title, and Jerry Jarrett is in total awe of the fact that he, along with many other men, lost out business to you! How do you even do this? To turn around so completely that you're on the same level as the idiot that drove Ric Flair out of the WCW/NWA brand by suggesting he dress up to look like a Spartan before it was even cool to mock Frank Miller's 300 is fucking incredible.

Congratu-fucking-lations, Vince, you've once again showed us that you weren't right for this industry by pulling this stupid stunt out of your tall glass of manure and feeding it to us on a weekly basis all while never giving us what got your business on a hot enough streak to survive the impending doom loaming over your head in the form of Turner's enterprise. Then to cap off this magnificent roll, you have the BRAND NEW stage collapse upon you, starting up a new storyline that went absolutely fucking nowhere. Even Katie Vick had a purpose in this industry, and a payoff. What's the payoff to your current story? Oh right, NOT A GOD DAMNED THING! We got Adamle as the Raw GM for about a coffee break, we got Stephanie and Shane feuding over the direction of the company in your absence in a brief moment and nothing has come of the chaotic, let-loose, sloppy management of your staff that resulted in a "fan" doing Batista's jig on live television in the backstage area and a light randomly falling in the middle of a backstage interview.

Thank you Vince, you've truly given so much to us fans. Now fucking stop it and allow others to give us what we'd actually like. You know, like how you allowed Vince Russo to become the best writer of our generation before he went off to WCW and showed that he's a fucking lunatic who should've remained in your tight little cage, only allowed to go out with a leash and a plastic bag to clean up the pile of dog shit he tends to leak out.

Mathew Sforcina: OK, I'm sure the majority of people who won cash were happy with these things. And we got a pretty cool Rickroll out of it. But this whole Mania thing was just... bad TV. Stilted performances, dead time, no forward momentum, reeks of desperation, and a finish that was a 3rd time attempt at an angle that was awkward to sit through. Here's the thing, if I watch wrestling, I want wrestling. Vince McMahon, while being an owner, can wrestle, and he can talk. He's better in small doses, but he can do that. If he DID do that, if he had been targeting a wrestler in a series of promos, and then ended up injured at the hands of this wrestler, while we may have gotten Vince V God again, we would have at least had an end point that was a good thing, in that you'd have a beloved/hated wrestler who took out The Boss. Instead we got Vince looking old while dialing a phone while Ric Flair pathetically Wooed next to him. And the worst thing is, since it's yet to be firmly answered, this might still get brought up! Eventually we'll find out how Steph/who Steph/who really took Vince out. It's like a black cloud over everything, but hey, at least it might lead to, you know, a wrestling match...

Jeremy Thomas: The Million Dollar Mania could probably be considered a bad idea from the get-go. The plan was sound enough…give away a whole lot of money and use the publicity to lure people in that might be reminded that the WWE was not a company that should be solely remembered for steroid trials and Chris Benoit. It was a way to grow the company's audience, and in that at least it was sound. However, those very people who would potentially be tuning in to view were then forced to watch the segments in which Vince would stand on the stage with a phone and a podium filled with money and then bore the living hell out of us. Never mind the fact that it smacked of desperation—"We'll pay you to watch us"—it was the execution that truly stunk.

Things were bad from the get-go, as on the very first giveaway segment, he got introduced to the internet phenomenon of Rick-Rolling. When your promo time is being stolen away by Rick Astley, you know you're in serious trouble. The next one resulted in three separate tries to get someone on the phone before they were finally able to give away some cash. It was embarrassingly awkward, as the winners sounded…remarkably unexcited and Vince didn't seem to know how to use the phone properly. You'd think this would have been fixed by the next week, but on the first segment he fumbled again. At least we had happy people then, but still it was pretty painful to sit through. Meanwhile, ratings didn't rise at any level of significance. Hell, for the first week, it was the exact same as the week before. So the plug was pulled, but not quietly and subtlely. No, we needed one more mess out of this before it was all going to go wrong.

On the last Million Dollar Mania Raw—which was also the Draft episode—we got six segments worth of this whole thing. They were just as painful as the previous weeks for the most part, with the exception of a Flair appearance and some good comedy with Khali. Then, the last segment of the show, he gave away a huge amount…half a million. As soon as it was done, a light fixture fell and hit the stage. There was an awkward pause and then sparks flew, the stage collapsed, and Vince was "crushed" underneath the Million Dollar Mania sign. Amidst all of this, while wrestling fans were rolling their eyes at another apparent "Someone's trying to kill Vince" angle, it was all played off as serious, and at least took the boss off the TV since.

There are so many reasons why this all went wrong…how boring it was, how messed up the stage collapse was and the embarrassing faux pas with the process. But perhaps the biggest problem is how drastically it failed. The ‘E (or Vince, one of the two) gave away three million dollars fruitlessly, as nothing changed in the ratings decline. So in the end, we were put through all of that for nothing. Gee, thanks guys. Really.

Stephen Randle: I assume we're talking the sum total of all his Million Dollar Mania promos, because really, they're all pretty equal in how horrible they were. From the very first show, when it seemed like they'd sent Vince out there with absolutely no script and had him frantically trying to ad-lib while an answering machine gave him a well-deserved RickRoll, all the way down to the sad ending of Vince getting crushed by the stage, despite it being obvious that it couldn't have realistically even ruffled his hair on the way down, the entire contest was a painful series of unfunny jokes, fake enthusiasm, and a guaranteed waste of about thirty minutes of Raw every week that it aired. Thirty minutes that could have been spent, oh, I don't know, putting on a quality product and raising the ratings that way, instead of poorly planned publicity stunts.





Honorable Mentions: WWE Great American Bash (9 points), TNA No Surrender (4 points), ROH Undeniable (1 point)

3rd Place: WWE Survivor Series () - 21 points

2nd Place: TNA Destination X () - 26 points

And your winner is...:



TNA Sacrifice () - 55 points


Larry Csonka: While this wasn't my selection for worst PPV of the year, I certainly cannot hold it against anyone for disliking this show. First of all it was easily the worst TNA PPV offering of the year, I have no problem saying that. The Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament was 90% horrible. Only the final match was worth watching, and it wasn't like that was a memorable match since it was only a *** bout. The Terror Dome Asylum was fun as was the main event, but that was it, it was just "fun." A few bright spots on a pile of shit is just a sparkling pile of shit. The show felt as if it was 8-hours long, the crowd was burnt out, and they just put on SO MUCH SHIT (10-Matches, 7 of them tag matches, and it all felt the same. And then, if all that wasn't enough, we had the head shaving of Roxxi. An angle that on that night hurt Gail Kim because she was put in a bad position and then when you consider the fact that they never followed up on like they should have, and this was just a giant cluster. DO we even need to discuss the fact that the chicks that were shitty and couldn't even get into the ring had nothing done to them, but the woman that came in "2nd place" got her head shaved? That about sums up how bad TNA can be at times.

Daniel Wilcox: I think that 2008 has been a very good year for PPV, as WWE, ROH and TNA have all managed to put on good shows more often than not. One major exception to this rule would be TNA's Sacrifice, perhaps best remembered for Kurt Angle having to drop out of the show due to injury and being replaced by Kaz in the main event for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Now credit where credit's due, Kaz worked twice that night but his presence in the main event, alongside Samoa Joe and Scott Steiner, wasn't enough to make up for the lack of Kurt Angle and the atrocity that was the rest of the card – predominantly made up of the ridiculous Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. As WWE has demonstrated recently with their Intercontinental Championship tournament, tournaments can go a long way in returning a degree of prestige to a mid-card title, but this Deuces Wild Tournament managed the complete opposite, because a regular tournament wasn't good enough. Eight singles competitors were randomly assigned tag partners, making up four makeshift tag teams, who more of then than not, had no interest in teaming with each other, thus making the entire tournament a waste of space. As it happened, the four regular teams advanced anyway, rendering the whole mess a waste of time. There wasn't a stand out match in the entire tournament, and the only redeeming factor is the fact that LAX walked out as champions. The rest of the show featured an average Knockout's Battle Royal and the debut of the Terror Dome, an admittedly fun match but, like everything else on the show, entirely forgettable. Actually, that's not entirely true, because certain things about this show were memorable, just for all the wrong reasons.

Randy Harrison: Remember Battlebowl. Remember how cool the concept seemed, yet how lame it was when it was finally jammed into practice? Well, if you take Battlebowl and add in a splash of Tag Team Championship, you have the Deuces Wild tournament, one of the worst ideas ever to come out of TNA. This pay-per-view was made up mostly of the Deuces Wild matches and saw all the classics like mismatched partners who hate each other and all of those other chestnuts that seem to come about with tag team tournaments. The thing that's so silly about the tournament is that they ended up having two tag teams who are actual tag teams (Team 3D and LAX) meet in the finals of the tournament. It left the whole tournament feeling pretty pointless. Add in the hideous TNA Knockouts Makeover Battle Royal, which only got three and a half minutes but by the time it was over, felt like an hour. Poor Roxxi Leveaux ended up with her head shaved at the end of it and the crowd chanted "Fire Russo", which is part proper sentiment, part frustration at having to see that kind of crap on a pay-per-view show.

This show also saw Kurt Angle pull out of the main event against Samoa Joe and Scott Steiner, leaving Kaz to step into his place by winning the Terror Dome match. While it was a cool moment to see Kaz in the main event and it should have led to much bigger things for him, it's also a big blow to a pay-per-view to lose one of your major stars so close to bell time. What really bugged me about it was that they waited until the show had begun to let any of their fans know that Angle was pulled from the show. That bait and switch really turned me off and started me in a bad mood before the show even began. The only cool thing about the show was the debut of the Terror Dome, but not so much for the match as for the structure. I always dig seeing the new structures that companies can come up with for matches and this one didn't disappoint. Sure, the match ended up being like every other X Division clusterfuck and sure they only had two legitimate option to win the match (Black Machismo and Kaz), but it was still a pretty good ten minutes. Ten minutes does not a show save, and this show was beyond saving. It's not that it was actively bad, just that it was so boring and bogged down with gimmick that it was hard to see any of the good.

Joseph Martinez: 2008 was a surprisingly deep year in terms of pay-per-view quality. However, it's crazy to believe that every PPV is going to be a classic. 2008‘s worst PPV of the year was marred by run-ins, a confusing tournament and overall average matches.

It all began with a stroke of bad luck when Kurt Angle was ruled out of the main event where he was scheduled to face Samoa Joe and Scott Steiner. The replacement for Kurt Angle was the winner of the Terrordome, Kaz. Another bad aspect of this PPV was The Deuces Wild Tournament, which can be best described as confusing.. This creation revolved around the idea of an established team facing off against a team of random individuals. This led to classic tandems like BG James and Awesome Kong and Booker T and Robert Roode. Another confusing idea was the TNA Knockouts Makeover Battle Royal, where the loser (who technically outlasted 8 other competitors) had to shave their head. It was a gutsy move by Roxxi Laveaux, but the stipulation was unnecessary. TNA made the right call by not allowing Kurt Angle to compete in the main event and Kaz did a great job as a substitute which saved the PPV from becoming an all-time bad one.





Honorable Mentions: Mark Henry w/ Tony Atlas vs. Matt Hardy – ECW Title Match (WWE SummerSlam, 08.17.08 – 5 points), ODB vs. Velvet Sky (TNA Impact, 06.05.08 – 1 point), Big Dave vs. Kane (WWE RAW, 08.25.08 – 17 points)

3rd Place: Braden Walker vs. Armando Alejandro Estrada (ECW, 07.08.08) - 19 points

2nd Place: Dave Batista vs. Chris Jericho, or Dave & Jericho vs. or… who knows… - Adamle Original Gauntlet Match (RAW, 10.20.08) - 20 points

And your winner is...:



Kaz vs. Black Reign – RAT ON A POLE MATCH (TNA Impact, 02.07.08) - 58 points


Jarrod Westerfeld: You can think of the worst match as being the one filled with the most botches or a serious lack of chemistry between the workers, you could even think it involves guys you don't like who just don't do anything for you. Everyone has their own definition of what makes a good match and the same can be said for bad matches. While there will probably be a few out there who enjoyed this match and think this is too harsh a criticism to lay upon this bout it must be said that, objectively, there was a lot wrong with this match.

To start off with, the production values of this match were atrocious. The fact that this was part of a taped and edited show and yet there were still camera shots that missed things used for the broadcast, shots that captured things they should not have captured and that it was all edited in a poor enough fashion should speak volumes of how bad this match comes off. Then there were the issues of the props involved in the match looking excessively cheap and horribly put together; the poles having black painted mail boxes attached to them, the rat traps having prop cheese on them, the poles being low enough for the two workers to see inside of the mail boxes, the cage for Misty being almost as big as the mail box it was stuffed inside. A litany of issues covered this match from beginning to end and all that can be said of this match is this: it was so bad that it accomplished absolutely nothing.

All of the hard work put into this bout by Kaz was for nothing as Dustin Rhodes is just so sluggish and so stiff in his movements. To require Black Reign to sell so much when he is incapable of selling the type of spots that Kaz was pulling out was a huge mistake. It also didn't help that the final spots of the bout were so rushed and lackluster that it made for every flashy move before it seem completely useless as Kaz only needed to incapacitate Black Reign with a single boot, allowing him enough time to climb the turnbuckle and retrieve the prize of the bout and the victory. As Ryan Byers' said of this match on his Impact Crater report, "[a]s funny as the match was, I actually got a little bit sad during its climax. See, despite the fact that he was stuck in a ridiculous gimmick match and despite the fact that he was wrestling one of the least mobile guys on the roster, poor Frankie Kazarian was still going out there and busting his ass." All that hard work by Kaz and it still came off as the worst match of the year.

Daniel Wilcox: When talking about TNA, the term "wasted potential" seems to come up a lot. Taking a young, talented and very popular performer like Kaz, who at the beginning of the year was seemingly on his way to superstardom, and putting him in a feud with Black Reign, over a rat no less, is the true definition of "wasted potential."

The culmination of this feud was the God-awful Rat on a Pole match. Because of all the prizes worth fighting for in the wrestling business, Black Reign's Arctic Fox Misty is right up there. There were poles on four corners of the ring, each one with a box attached. In one box was the rat, in the other boxes were mouse traps. In theory, that makes for an interesting concept, but the poles weren't all that high and we could clearly see that the participants could see into the boxes, yet they still put their hands in the boxes with the traps. This match just exposed how bad the booking of the company could be and how badly thought out and planned the production was. Kaz tried hard, but getting a good match out of Dustin Rhodes in 2008 is no easy feat. These two never clicked and their feud has to be considered one of the worst of the year, this match merely putting an exclamation point on that statement.

Randy Harrison: While he's proven to be injury-prone, Kaz is a very good wrestler and he was very deserving of the push that he received late last year when he was wrestling main eventers like Christian Cage and Kurt Angle in high-profile matches. He deserved far better than to be stuck with this horrible match against a less-than-motivated Goldust knock-off. That's not even touching the hideous rat on a pole gimmick that they got saddled with. Anytime that Dustin Rhodes isn't Goldust, he's been horribly unentertaining and this match was no different. A match with stuff on a pole is generally a dumb idea and a bad match, but the prop poles and mail box thingies that TNA used for this one were even more hokey than the props they used for Rhino's "Eight Mile" Streetfight. For wasting someone as talented as Kaz on this horrible a match, having Dustin Rhodes in a match period, and for having something as stupid as a rat being what was fought over, this is possibly the easiest choice there's been for worst match of the year in quite some time.

Ryan Byers: One of the hallmarks of TNA's idiocy over the years has been the fact that the company takes otherwise talented wrestlers and puts them in situations in which they are handicapped by either their opponent or a gimmick and unable to work up to their full potential. That's exactly what happened when Frankie Kazarian locked it up with Dustin "Black Reign/Goldust/The Natural" Runnels in February of this year. The two of them locked it up before as part of their feud and the two of them would go on to lock it up later, and every time it was clear that Kazarian's high impact, high flying offense was being impeded by Runnels, who appears to still understand the mental aspect of the sport despite the fact that his age, injuries, and excess weight have prevented him from being as physically impressive as he once was. However, no iteration of their feud was more embarrassing than the epic RATS ON POLES~! Match.

For those of you who missed it, allow me to explain. You see, Chocolate Reign carried around a rat as a part of his gimmick. Despite the fact that he was supposedly a valiant babyface, the company decided that it would be a good idea for Kazarian to further the feud by stealing Dustin's pet. Faster than you could say "Bobby Heenan versus Matilda," the Son of a Son of a Plumber and the Southern California indy standout were battling it out in a match in which the custody of the rodent was on the line, a stipulation that still gives little Dominic Misterio nightmares.

Of course, putting things on poles and having wrestlers run up to retrieve them is nothing new in TNA. It seems like somebody has to shimmy up an extended ringpost every other week in the company. However, the architects of this match made sure that it would be an extra large, heapin' pile of suck. Yes, Kazarian bumped his ass off trying to make something decent of something that was otherwise destined to wind up in this very position. Despite his best efforts, he came up short.

Why? First of all, the match failed in presentation. When WWE puts together a structure for a special gimmick match, it is visually impressive . . . just look at Hell in a Cell or the Elimination Chamber. Even TNA gets this right 90% of the time as evidenced by the Terrordome or Elevation X. There was nothing remotely visually appealing about this match's setup. In fact, it's almost as though somebody in TNA production went out of his way in order to make this appear low rent. The poles looked normal, but TNA needed to find containers for the rat that was on the line in the match as well as the three mousetraps which were set to clamp down on the hand of any man who chose the wrong corner. What did they do for these containers? They apparently went down to the local Home Depot, bought the cheapest mailboxes they could find, and spraypainted them black. You could even see the little holes that were left when the flags were ripped off the side.

The second major problem with the match was in the execution. Even if the concept wasn't mind-numbing and even if the setup looked fine, you still had to deal with the fact that whoever put the poles together didn't make them quite long enough. Both competitors, particularly the deceptively tall Dustin Rhodes, were able to easily see in to the mailboxes once they popped them open. This meant that, once they were standing on the top strand, they had to either duck or inexplicably look the other way so that they wouldn't be at eye level with the traps that they were supposed to be avoiding. And, besides, if you knew that you were potentially putting your hand in to a box containing a mousetrap, wouldn't you AVOID sticking your hand straight in? Wouldn't you move it to the left or the right in an attempt to brush up against the side of the trap instead of placing your fingers in such a position that they are sure to be smashed? Sure, you might be bright enough to think of that, but apparently these two professional wrestlers aren't. Then again, one does have to wonder how Black Reign could even be injured by a mousetrap given that he wore thick rubber gloves out to the ring for every one of his matches.

In short, this had all of the ingredients for a godawful gimmick match. First of all, the gimmick didn't add anything to the quality of the bout and probably took away from it. Furthermore, the setup looked ridiculously silly. Finally, it made both the competitors and the company incompetent. That's why this one is going down as the worst match of 2008.


Be sure to check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 4 tomorrow, and Part 5 on Friday! Thank you for joining us for the 2008 411mania Year End Wrestling Awards!