My TNA Catch-Up, Slammiversary PPV Jun 08

Coming from Memphis, celebrating TNA's 6th anniversary.

X Division Championship, Petey Williams vs Kaz. Williams was wearing the face guard to protect a broken orbital bone (eye socket) & Kaz was being extremely careful of that injury keeping all his kicks below shoulder level and all punches were well below the neck. A very even match, Kaz taking ALL the hard bumps but Williams winning of a very weird looking (was it flubbed?) Canadian Destroyer. Kaz gets a post match beatdown & the return of Abyss making the save in a new outfit & different mask.

6 Woman Knockout Tag Match, The Beatiful People (Angelina Love & Velvet Sky) & Moose (aka Mickie Knuckles) vs Gail Kim, ODB & Roxxi. This match started with Love & Sky bailing out of the ring pretty sharpish leaving Moose to go 3 on 1 with Kim, ODB & Roxxi. Love & Sky were walking off up the ramp only to get jumped from behind by Kim & ODB leaving Roxxi & Moose to go 1 on 1 in the ring & Roxxi was dishing it out hard & fast to Moose who can certainly take a good beating! ODB & Moose was the pairing everyone had been waiting to see & it didn't disappoint! ODB took a great win off the running powerslam on Moose. Great Match!

Tag Championship Match, Team 3D vs LAX (with Salinas & Hector Guerrerro). This match couldn't have been any worse. Homicide took the win off a roll up.

Awesome Kong & Raisha Saeed come down to the ring with Jeremy Borash & throw out the $25,000 fan challenge yet again. Again we have multiple applicants & they are Sarina Deeb (sp?) (claiming MMA training) & Josey Robinson.

Awesome Kong vs Sarina Deeb (?) from Horath, Mississippi. Sarina gave pretty much no offense & took the same smash into the guardrail that Daffney did last week (showing she's a jobber) & she also got put into the steps. Kong took the win off the Implant Buster but Sarina knew her stuff & took good hard looking bumps!

Awesome Kong vs Josey Robinson from Memphis, Tennessee. Clearly not content with beating 1 jobber, Kong decided to give the 2nd girl a go at the money as well. Josey took it right to Kong & gave her THE best offence ANY of the challengers have done so far. Kong took off the padded gloves she normally wears to fight in so Josey had clearly gotten under Kong's skin here. Kong won off the Awesome Bomb which Josey took really well & sold like crazy. Excellent match, hire Josey!

Eric Young finds "Elvis" (an impersonator) who rather stupidly gets into the ring with Kong only to take an Awesome Bomb for his troubles so he was clearly a local jobber.

"Wedding" of Jay Lethal & So Cal Val. TNA's worst idea yet & its not even theirs, its stolen from WWF. Guests included Kamala (was that really him?), Jake "The Snake" Roberts (mark like crazy for Jake's 2nd TNA appearance!), Koko B Ware (can't be the original Frankie, he'd be about 800 by now!) & George "The Animal" Steele (looking about 800 himself now!). Both Roberts & Steele must have been having 80's Miss Elizabeth flashbacks when Val came to the ring in her dress. As predicted Dutt stopped the wedding saying he loved Val more & attacked Lethal. We also got to see Dutt face off with Koko & Kamala, Jake threw a snake in & Steele ate the turnbuckle! So we had no wedding (no shock there really) & Dutt finally gets to drop The Guru gimmick in a heel turn.

Kurt Angle vs AJ Styles. With Tomko at ringside the outcome to this was never going to be a fair one & with Angle involved all the good moves were going to be coming from AJ. Hebner did eventually send Tomko back to the locker room & Styles took advantage from there onwards. I didn't see how Styles got bloodied (his nosebleed) so was that a work or an accident? A work I assume as Angle carried on punching him in the head & face afterwards. On the whole Angle seemed happy putting Styles over & selling pretty well for him too. AJ sold everything Kurt was doing but he always does. The ref bump was totally pointless as was Karen Angle's "help", AJ took the eventual win off the Styles Clash only to earn himself a post match beatdown from Kurt & Tomko. You know Russo is getting strapped for ideas when so many matches end in a pointless beatdown.

World Heavyweight Championship - King Of The Mountain Match. With Kevin Nash as Special Enforcer, Rhino vs Robert Roode vs Christian Cage vs Booker T vs Samoa Joe. Rules are pretty simple, pin someone to become eligible to hang the belt, if you hang the belt you win. The person who you pin has to spend 2 minutes in the penalty cage. Booker T was 1st to make a pin (on Rhino but whoever was timekeeping totally acrewed up as they started Rhino's time before he'd even got into the penalty cage). Cage's high cross body block onto everyone off the top of the cage was pretty crazy. Roode was 2nd to make a pin (on Cage & again the timer started before he was inside the penalty cage). Rhino was 3rd to pin (on Roode & yes you guessed it the time was started before he got caged). Cage was 4th to pin (on Booker with a wicked frogsplash onto both Joe & Booker off the top of the cage). Joe was 5th to pin (on Roode with a musclebuster off the ladder), Joe then hung the belt & retained his title but he can thank Kevin Nash for a partial assist for slowing down Booker T with a jackknife powerbomb.

Not a great PPV for TNA, the 6 woman match was the best by far. I assume a large amount of TNA's budget went on 1 off payments to the big names attending the wedding that never happened.