This was a Full Metal Mayhem (TNA speak for TLC) match for the Guns’ TNA World Tag Team Titles.
A little over a year and a half before their first relatively famous one, the Young Bucks have their first great ladder match, unsurprisingly against the team that they’ve had their most reliable success with yet to this point.
You know how this goes.
The combination of the phrases “Young Bucks” and “ladder/TLC match”, especially when used as a combination together, ought to have told you, for the most part, if this could be for you. For the most part, you would be correct. If you’re maybe a little like me though — which is to say if you haven’t enjoyed the Bucks much in the last five years (basically from AEW on) but have a certain fondness for their earlier work — this might be something you could enjoy.
I certainly did.
This isn’t to say it’s their best match with the Guns. It isn’t even their best match with the Guns this year, or their second best really. Honestly, it isn’t even their best pay-per-view ladder match involving the Guns, although you have to wait almost six years for that. It does, however work for a lot of the same reasons as that Ultimate X match, combined with a lot of the reasons for the Bucks’ later artistic successes in the years following this TNA run.
Firstly, there is a ton of cool shit here.
All four have some great ideas to put on display here, often hitting that wonderful area in between cool and terrifying that can make for such an exciting feeling. The match doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but they find a lot of novel ways to use that ground. It’s a match that, in smaller ways, still feels really modern thirteen years later. Not so much that cliché about still being a few steps ahead of its time, but like, kind of just barely still ahead of its time. If it happened tomorrow — September 9th, 2023 — I would still call a lot of what happens in this match inventive.
Secondly, it’s really mean.
Like so much of the Bucks’ best work in the first half of the decade, there’s a real meanness of spirit to this. All the big shots and moments where a chair is swung or a ladder is thrown feel like they come with parenthesis containing some kind of shouted insult. It’s not a big brawl, but it manages to feel hostile in its own way.
The other major thing the Bucks got so right in the first half of the decade in these big brawls, beyond still getting that they are unlikeable freaks who should always be built up to be punished in big blowoff smoke & mirrors gimmick matches, was the design of the matches. The craft and construction. For the most part, save one single moment of setting up a table for no reason near the end, this is almost always a match where it feels like someone is either (a) trying to win, or (b) trying to punish the opposing team. Even the big piece of construction, a table bridge on top of three ladders to create a scaffold in a janky ass TNA fashion, is properly set up. The first half of the match is filled with moments where one of the guys tries to climb, but the belts are a little too high unless you stand on the very very top of the ladder. It’s maybe counterproductive of the match — and commentary with it — to point out that these are not tall guys, but it leads somewhere in the match, to a finish set up that might have otherwise felt a little hokey.
Another thing I liked a lot about this match was that, like the Ultimate X match and like the big gimmick matches (Ladder, Cage, & Ultimate X) against Beer Money over the summer, the gimmick and a familiarity with it really does matter in the end.
Generation Me is not as behind as they were in Ultimate X, this is not the Guns’ environment in quite the same way, but they are still behind, in a way more in line with the overall theme of the feud that sees ambitious kids overreach against the best in the world. They know how to use the ladders and succeed with big spots using them, but are always a little less successful in setting up moments to climb than Shelley and Sabin are, and more often than not, are the ones who pay the price for big set ups, as opposed to the Guns, whose big idea (table scaffold) pays off in the end.
Sabin and one of the Bucks wind up on the scaffold at the end, but true to the idea of the match and the series, the Jackson is nowhere near as comfortable up there. Sabin dodges a chair shot, hits his own to the back to send the kid off through a table below, and brings the titles down to win.
Not their best, but an impressive match, and one that I had personally forgotten all about. Maybe you have too. That’s not so much me saying to go watch it immediately or anything, but you know, if you come across it and are the sort of person who might like this or you saw one of their matches and just want to see more of these teams together, you can do a lot worse.
One of the better big stipulation matches the Bucks have ever had on semi-major pay-per-view.