How did this disaster survive for years without an induction?
Look, I’m the first to admit that as I’m getting older my memory is going. I see things that I know are Crap-worthy, and after the grace period of the calendar year, I put them up for the Gooker voting. If they lose…I forget them. They crawl into some dark corner of my mind, and they escape induction for years down the road.
But not this.
Seriously, how did I not induct this unmitigated disaster the day after the 2007 Gooker was inducted? Yeah yeah, I know I’ve never done daily updates, but this thing was so horrendous I really should have made an exception.
I mean, seriously…the Last Rites match.
What’s that? You’ve never heard of this? Are you sure? Certain you aren’t just like me and saw it years back and your brain short-circuited and said, “No, we are not wasting any space in the hippocampus on this”?
Well, then we’re all going to suffer through this together.
So Sting and Abyss had been feuding for months. Sting, being a good guy and all, thought that Abyss was not evil, but rather had surrounded himself with evil in the form of the gentleman to our left, Mr. James Mitchell.
Now I could bore you to tears with their backstory of how he was Abyss’ father and how his mom shot Mitchell three times and how Abyss claimed to have been the culprit and…nah, nuts to that.
Just look at the guy.
He’s got a big devil beard, a skullet, a blood red suit, and a cane in the form of a snake.
Dude is evil.
Evil, says I.
And says Sting, who bloodied him to a pulp and caused him to vanish from TV for weeks. This gave the Stinger the opening he was looking for with Abyss.
The opening to kill him.
I’m not joking.
Look, there’s Sting laying in a casket.
“What does it feel like to die?” the Stinger eloquently asks. “I believe it’s a choice. See, you can choose darkness and finality, gnashing of teeth. Or you can choose life.”
Just so I have this straight…for Sting, dying feels like a choice, wherein one of the choices is in fact to live.
Yeah, I don’t know either, dude.
(WrestleCrap.com Fun Fact: When I write a new induction, I take the last new induction I did, copy the file, and revise it with all the new copy and images. In this instance, the image and text you see was where the next image and text should go. However, following Sting’s death/life riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a crummy TNA storyline, good ol’ Man Mountain Rock summed up my feelings better than anything else I could possibly come up with.
So he sticks around for another week.)
Al this buffoonery leads us to the match we’re here to talk about today: Last Rites. Again, you may never have heard of this match and have no idea what it was all about.
Ironically, leading into the match itself, no one knew what the match was either. The rules were never explained on television, and all we got were goofy vignettes like the one above.
Which is a shame, really – had someone told folks at home that this match was going to feature CANDLEABRAS, I bet the buyrate would have been through the roof.
(This is the point in the induction where I miss Triple Kelly, as I know she’d drop a Liberace reference.
And then I’d wonder how on earth a girl who was twenty-five knew who the hell Liberace even was.
But yeah, this match…it had candleabras, baby.)
And it had a death bed.
Let me repeat that.
It had a DEATH BED.
Now, I always thought a death bed was where you were laying as you took your last breath. Perhaps it’s at home, perhaps it’s in a hospital.
Well, in TNA, your death bed is your casket. I guess when it looks like you’re about to die, they just throw you in there.
I know they waste zero time in this company, but that seems just a bit extreme to me.
So yeah, the way to win the match is to put your opponent in the death bed and close the lid, which is right up there withputting your opponent in the chair of torture as the stupidest way to determine a wrestling contest ever.
And you know what? It wasn’t just that reminding me of Chamber of Horrors, as we got goofy headstones here too.
I should also note that I’d blame the resolution of my screen grab on the fact it looks as though it says “PIP”, but given the level of quality control in TNA, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they misspelled it.
Not sure what they were made of, but those things were heavy.
I mean, I thought poor Abyss might throw out his back picking it up. Look at the poor guy.
Scant seconds later, though, Sting picked it up as though it was made of paper mache.
If ever Plan 9 from Outer Space was made into a wrestling match, it would be this one.
Abyss gets the upper hand by hitting Sting in the gut with the dreaded candelabra. Our hero crumples to the mat, his white face paint covered by a crimson mask.
Now I’m no doctor, but if someone hit me in the stomach and suddenly I had blood gushing from my forehead…man…I’d know that was bad.
With Sting seemingly down for the count, Abyss waves his arms in the air and a casket lowers from the ceiling.
Wait, did I say casket?
I meant DEATH BED, of course!
And what of poor Sting, who has bladed from ear to ear, a completely bloody mess?
Well, the fans are making noise at least.
Hopefully he considers very loud and very distict “Fire Russo!” chants motivational.
Which somehow leads to Abyss choke slamming Sting on top of the death bed.
Which somehow leads to “TNA!” chants from the crowd.
This would be the same crowd that two minutes ago was chanting for the head writer to be fired.
How on earth could Dixie Carter even CONSIDER not taping every single TNA show in front of these brain dead Orlando fans until the end of time?
Not satisfied with the carnage he’s laid upon his foe, Abyss goes outside and gets two chairs, putting yet another tombstone across them.
Maybe it’s just me, but if I had an (allegedly) heavy piece of rock like that, and my opponent was laying face down, I’d clobber him in the back of the head with it.
Let’s see who is smarter here – Abyss or RD Reynolds.
As the death bed struggled to be lifted to the ceiling, we thankfully said good bye to this insipid match, which was considered a disaster by pretty much everyone, amazingly including even those in TNA.
Don’t believe me? Remember that horrible reverse battle royal?
They did that twice.
Last Rites?
Once.
Need I say more?