Welcome everyone to the premiere edition of the Golden Gauntlet! My name is Jordan Huie and something you should know about me is that I am an absolute tournament junkie. In any setting really, organize a high level crochet tournament and I’d probably watch it. But this especially holds true for wrestling. Single elim, double elim, round robin, they’re my jam. Not that I can think of any double elimination tournaments in wrestling off the top of my head but I assure you, if it happened, I’d be all over it.
I’ve a dream of being head booker of a promotion of my own one day and thus I of course love fantasy booking and partake in booking sims. Naturally I end up booking many a tournament in doing this. It’s always fun to give them names and one I find myself gravitating towards quite a bit is ‘Golden Gauntlet’. I always do love myself some alliteration. Plus, it gets the whole idea of a championship tournament across in two swift words, atleast I think so. Never really used the name for anything of significance though, so why not change that?
And since we’re doing a Golden Gauntlet for real, why not get all the readers involved~?
My idea is one you may have seen before, atleast in principle. It shall be a tournament, or rather a series of tournaments should this take off, in which every victor is decided by fan voting. That’s right, you all pick the winners! I think it’s pretty easy to come up with a ton of themes to base a tournament around with wrestling and it just, kinda fits. It’s got that fantasy booking aspect of pitting wrestlers from different generations against each other.
I figure the cleanest, most convenient way to do this would be to simply use twitter polls. And we can go round by round ’til we’ve crowned a champion. Which, I think is an apt choice of words, considering where we’re beginning here…
With no further adieu, welcome ladies and gentlemen to…
Golden Gauntlet #1: Crowning The Greatest NXT Champion Of All Time!
Conveniently, with Adam Cole’s title victory at Takeover XXV, we now have exactly 16 NXT Champions to evaluate. That makes for a perfect, clean, beautiful four-round tournament. That’s great for a trial run, as it’ll be long enough for people to get a sense of how this works but not so long as to be overwhelming.
I have literally watched every bit of NXT’s modern incarnation from it’s Full Sail debut in 2012 to today, and I’ve always followed it closer than most. So I can tell you quite a bit about every single champion and the reigns that they presided over.
To give a bit of order to this, seeding rules are in effect! The champs have been seeded by myself and my girlfriend, a fellow NXT fanatic. They were ranked not by our opinions on them as performers but specifically on how they were as a champion. This is determined by how their initial title victory was built to, the moment of their winning and losing the championship, the quality of their defenses, and what their reign did for the value of the title.
We tried to be as objective with this as possible, but of course it’s going to boil down to opinions no matter what criteria you use. If you disagree with the placements, that’s fine, it doesn’t really matter too much anyway. It’s simply a means of getting into the spirit of doing a tournament. Who actually wins the thing is entirely up to you!
I’ll be ‘previewing’ the prospective matches of this tournament – as well as getting into why everyone is ranked where they are specifically – beginning this week! You can watch this page or keep checking the main page for updates. As soon as they’re done, you’ll be able to find them below.
Round 1
#1 Tommaso Ciampa vs. #16 Drew McIntyre
#9 Seth Rollins vs. #8 Andrade ‘Cien’ Almas
#4 Johnny Gargano vs. #13 Aleister Black
#5 Sami Zayn vs. #12 Samoa Joe
#2 Adrian Neville vs. #15 Big E. Langston
#7 Bo Dallas vs. #10 Adam Cole
#3 Finn Balor vs. #14 Shinsuke Nakamura
#6 Kevin Owens vs. #11 Bobby Roode
Would you like to read a story in which many of your favorite wrestlers are forced to death in front of a bunch of bloodthirsty aliens? Check out my Patreon in which just such a story is being posted chapter-by-chapter for free!
