Thriller Ant
Beep Bop Boop
I was shocked to see them coming to DeKalb; if it wasn't for NIU, this place would be a farm town with like 5,000 people. Here's the view from where I sat (we'll come back to the cage):
I'm terrible at guessing audience size, but if you put a gun to my head, I'd say there were at least 800 people there. It also snowed from 8 am until sometime after the show started, so that might have caused people to stay home, especially since people were buying tickets at the box office in the arena. One of the new jobber guys, Dewey Barnes, was working the merch stand. I went in with the intention of buying a t-shirt, but I would never wear any of the ones they had.
What ever JB gets paid, he needs to get at least 3x as much. He did the ring announcing, all the hyping between matches for the backstage passes, and was running the music and bell at ringside. One issue though: he has creepily small hands that made for an awkward handshake.
First match was ECIII against James Storm. They did some back and forth on the mic before the match arguing about beer vs. wine. No clue how WWE missed on Carter. I don't know that he's world champion material, but he can work pretty well in the ring and he plays a great heel. Storm was solid as always and won with the superkick.
Next up were the boobs. Gail Kim has really tiny legs and Velvet Sky is gorgeous. Pretty solid women's match; Velvet won with a semi-botched Pedigree.
The third match had the Wolves facing the Bro Mans for the TNA Tag Titles. The Wolves were awesome as always, and I was surprised and how not awful the Bros were. The Wolves were able to work the crowd, but the Bros did great to get big heat. Davey had Jesse pinned, but Robbie pulled the ref out of the ring and that plus the copious amounts of cheating they did throughout the match led to their disqualification. A really smart thing they did after the match was have the Wolves hand out a couple backstage passes. Most of the audience doesn't know these guys, but free stuff is a simple way to get guys over with a few fans.
This is where the show kind of started going downhill. There was Bobby Roode against Gunner. Roode stalled, which was a good theory, since he was definitely getting more support than Gunner. The issue was that no one gave a shit about Gunner, so people just got pissed. Roode did his best, but in addition to people not caring about him, Gunner did nothing to get the crowd involved. Good theory, but did not work well at all.
The final match before intermission was Bully Ray against Mr. Anderson in a 2 out of 3 falls match. Ray jumped Anderson during Anderson's entrance and did something (I couldn't quite see, the people in front of me jumped up just in time to block my view) that caused Anderson to be out for literally 5 minutes. That's not an exaggeration. Ray rolled Anderson back into the ring and argued with Brian Hebner about ringing the bell. Hebner finally did and then reluctantly counted the pin. After a rest period, Ray argued with Hebner again and, after way too long of an argument for the obvious result, Hebner shoved Ray into a roll-up by Anderson. So, essentially, it was a glorified one on one match, and a meh one at that. Anderson won with the Mic Check. The cool thing came after the match, when Anderson had a little kid do his introduction and gave the kid his t-shirt.
There was a 15 minute intermission so they could set up the cage. This is where the people who got the $50 deal could go backstage, but I didn't get one. After seeing it all set up, having never seen a cage match before, I must say that the spectacle of a cage match is awesome. There may be crazier gimmick matches, but man, does that cage look amazing.
The main event was Magnus defending the TNA World Title against Samoa Joe in the cage. I was pumped to see Joe wrestle live for the first time. It wasn't too bad of a match, but it went from first gear to third gear to the finish. There was a ref bump, Joe had Magnus pinned during the bump, and when Joe opened the door to ask for the other ref, ECIII, who had snuck out to ringside, slammed the door on Joe's head. Of course, that's right when the ref woke up for Magnus to retain.
Joe choked out ECIII afterward to stand tall. At the end of the night, you could pay $20 to have a photo taken with Joe in front of the cage. I took them up on that offer. I got to grab the cage, which is legit, and this:
Overall, it was an a lot of fun and I would definitely go again if TNA comes near me.
I'm terrible at guessing audience size, but if you put a gun to my head, I'd say there were at least 800 people there. It also snowed from 8 am until sometime after the show started, so that might have caused people to stay home, especially since people were buying tickets at the box office in the arena. One of the new jobber guys, Dewey Barnes, was working the merch stand. I went in with the intention of buying a t-shirt, but I would never wear any of the ones they had.
What ever JB gets paid, he needs to get at least 3x as much. He did the ring announcing, all the hyping between matches for the backstage passes, and was running the music and bell at ringside. One issue though: he has creepily small hands that made for an awkward handshake.
First match was ECIII against James Storm. They did some back and forth on the mic before the match arguing about beer vs. wine. No clue how WWE missed on Carter. I don't know that he's world champion material, but he can work pretty well in the ring and he plays a great heel. Storm was solid as always and won with the superkick.
Next up were the boobs. Gail Kim has really tiny legs and Velvet Sky is gorgeous. Pretty solid women's match; Velvet won with a semi-botched Pedigree.
The third match had the Wolves facing the Bro Mans for the TNA Tag Titles. The Wolves were awesome as always, and I was surprised and how not awful the Bros were. The Wolves were able to work the crowd, but the Bros did great to get big heat. Davey had Jesse pinned, but Robbie pulled the ref out of the ring and that plus the copious amounts of cheating they did throughout the match led to their disqualification. A really smart thing they did after the match was have the Wolves hand out a couple backstage passes. Most of the audience doesn't know these guys, but free stuff is a simple way to get guys over with a few fans.
This is where the show kind of started going downhill. There was Bobby Roode against Gunner. Roode stalled, which was a good theory, since he was definitely getting more support than Gunner. The issue was that no one gave a shit about Gunner, so people just got pissed. Roode did his best, but in addition to people not caring about him, Gunner did nothing to get the crowd involved. Good theory, but did not work well at all.
The final match before intermission was Bully Ray against Mr. Anderson in a 2 out of 3 falls match. Ray jumped Anderson during Anderson's entrance and did something (I couldn't quite see, the people in front of me jumped up just in time to block my view) that caused Anderson to be out for literally 5 minutes. That's not an exaggeration. Ray rolled Anderson back into the ring and argued with Brian Hebner about ringing the bell. Hebner finally did and then reluctantly counted the pin. After a rest period, Ray argued with Hebner again and, after way too long of an argument for the obvious result, Hebner shoved Ray into a roll-up by Anderson. So, essentially, it was a glorified one on one match, and a meh one at that. Anderson won with the Mic Check. The cool thing came after the match, when Anderson had a little kid do his introduction and gave the kid his t-shirt.
There was a 15 minute intermission so they could set up the cage. This is where the people who got the $50 deal could go backstage, but I didn't get one. After seeing it all set up, having never seen a cage match before, I must say that the spectacle of a cage match is awesome. There may be crazier gimmick matches, but man, does that cage look amazing.
The main event was Magnus defending the TNA World Title against Samoa Joe in the cage. I was pumped to see Joe wrestle live for the first time. It wasn't too bad of a match, but it went from first gear to third gear to the finish. There was a ref bump, Joe had Magnus pinned during the bump, and when Joe opened the door to ask for the other ref, ECIII, who had snuck out to ringside, slammed the door on Joe's head. Of course, that's right when the ref woke up for Magnus to retain.
Joe choked out ECIII afterward to stand tall. At the end of the night, you could pay $20 to have a photo taken with Joe in front of the cage. I took them up on that offer. I got to grab the cage, which is legit, and this:
Overall, it was an a lot of fun and I would definitely go again if TNA comes near me.
