One of the biggest home-grown stars most associated with TNA (now known as Impact Wrestling) is AJ Styles. He spent 12 years with TNA putting on great matches against all of the top stars of the company including Samoa Joe and Christopher Daniels, whose X Division bouts together have gone down as the best in the promotion’s history.
Since then, Styles’ has become even more popular thanks to a run in New Japan Pro-Wrestling followed by signing with World Wrestling Entertainment, where he remains today. However, while AJ Styles did a lot of great work in TNA, the company made a lot of stupid decisions with him -- so many that it’s no surprise that he eventually quit.
10 Sports Entertainment Xtreme
In 2003, Vince Russo was working with TNA and decided to fall back on two of his favorite ideas: upstart factions and juvenile acronyms. From there, Sports Entertainment Xtreme (S.E.X. for short) was born, featuring numerous guys from his WCW faction New Blood, including Mike Sanders, David Flair, and himself.
Eventually, AJ Styles would be added to their ranks, during which he’d win the NWA World Title, but would also flip-flop between heel and face a couple of times.
9 Losing the Title to Rob Van Dam
In the spring of 2010, Rob Van Dam debuted in TNA, where he beat Sting in mere seconds in his very first match for the company. About a month later, RVD would end up challenging and defeating AJ Styles for the TNA World Title, which sounds like it would be a big deal but it happened on a random episode of Impact with zero build.
Ultimately, it felt like TNA in a nutshell -- pushing ex-WWE talent at the expense of their awesome homegrown guys.
8 The New Nature Boy
AJ Styles has been a heel in the past, like when he was a goofy henchman in Christian Cage’s stable, Christian’s Coalition, but not all heel turns are created equal. In 2010 at Genesis, Styles ended up turning heel and was not only taken under Ric Flair’s wing but also pushed as the next “Nature Boy.”
Unfortunately, the gimmick went a little too far, as Styles dyed his hair and started wearing the signature entrance robe -- neither of which fit the performer and ultimately did him a disservice. Little did TNA know that Bobby Roode would one day actually find success wearing a sparkly robe to the ring, albeit in WWE.
7 Wearing a Reindeer Costume
The December 20, 2007 episode of Impact was full of Christmas-themed gimmick matches, including the main event where AJ Styles took on Frankie Kazarian in a ladder match. The twist here was that a reindeer costume was suspended over the ring rather than a title belt, with the loser of the match being forced to wear the outfit.
AJ lost -- just like he did in the Turkey Bowl match a month before -- but took forever to put the suit on, trying to escape the ring and struggling against a legion of referees to avoid wearing it. It was very silly, but maybe too silly for some fans.
6 Aces & Eights Drama
The Aces & Eights storyline, involving a biker gang of ex-WWE guys invading the company, has been criticized by many fans for being nWo-lite, and part of that can be attributed to the way AJ Style was incorporated into the angle. Just like Sting and the nWo, Aces & Eights tried to recruit Styles, and TNA management and interviewers harangued him -- and his family! -- about Styles’ loyalty to the company.
Rather than answering the question clearly, Styles ended up adopting a “darker” persona, just like the Stinger but did not seem to attempt to shout-out any 1990s comic book movies while doing so.
5 Designing This T-Shirt and Making Him Wear It
Official wrestling T-shirts are often over-designed and kind of ugly, and this AJ Styles tee is no exception. TNA struck memetic gold with the shirt, as the combination of AJ’s awkward photo and the implication of the splattered design (to put it vaguely) were absolutely hysterical and often gets shared among wrestling fans on the Internet.
As embarrassing as it is, AJ Styles appears to have a good sense of humor about it.
4 Summer of Styles
Once the Aces & Eights storyline was put to bed in 2013, TNA entered the Bound For Glory series, a tournament where wrestlers would earn points for winning matches, with the highest scorer getting a title shot against World Champ Bully Ray at the Bound For Glory PPV. AJ Styles won it, and TNA boss Dixie Carter vowed to hold Styles down.
As a result, the storyline ended up resembling the 2011 “Summer of Punk” in WWE, with AJ Styles winning the title and leaving the company with it for a short period. The thing is, that worked because CM Punk was never a top star in the company, whereas AJ Styles had held the World Title numerous times by 2013.
3 Affair with Dixie Carter
AJ Styles’ relationship with Dixie Carter wasn’t always antagonistic, however. In 2012, Styles got into a feud with Christopher Daniels -- a surefire formula for great matches, but with a pretty poorly received storyline to go with it.
Daniels sought to expose an illicit affair between Styles and Carter, which was already kind of weird, but then got weirder when Dixie’s parents started receiving concerned questions about it at the country club.
2 Claire Lynch
The Styles/Dixie/Daniels angle ended up abruptly rewritten, and not for the better. Suddenly, the two weren’t having an affair, but were helping out a pregnant drug addict named Claire Lynch, who -- plot twist! -- might be having Styles’ baby.
Fan reception to this was so poor that they shifted gears again to reveal that it was all an elaborate ruse. The matches that resulted from this were highly acclaimed, but the angle itself has gone down in infamy as TNA’s worst.
1 Letting Him Go
There’s a possibility that AJ Styles would have stayed at TNA past 2014 had they not attempted to give him a massive pay cut, which is a slap in the face to one of the few homegrown stars of the company.
Chances are, if TNA tried to keep him around, he wouldn’t go to New Japan and take over Bullet Club, which in turn means he wouldn’t have signed with WWE. TNA’s loss really was their competition’s gain.