Chair shots to the upper back and head. Slams through tables. Barbed wire, fire, and thumbtacks. Buckets of blood, handcuffs, and sick bumps. What do these have in common? They’re all associated with a certain style of professional wresting. The sub-genre that some consider garbage wrestling has known many names over the years: no holds barred, no disqualification, street fight, deathmatch, and lights-out match. But perhaps the most common nickname for this type of wrestling is “hardcore”.
TODAY’S ISSUE: Hardcore wrestling.
In a performance art form that revolves around staged violence specifically designed to look as dangerous as possible while harming the participants as little as necessary, why would a wrestler perform a hardcore match in which the stakes are raised and the possibility of injury is greatly increased? There can be many answers to that question. The best-case scenario is when two men (or teams) have battled for months with no clear winner, and the blow-off match is intended to be an epic, violent final chapter to their war. The goal is to sell a lot of tickets, merchandise, or pay-per-view buys based on the intensity and emotion of their last battle.
A cage is a great battlefield for such a contest to be waged, and old school southern promotions used to favor strap matches, dog collar/chain matches, and “Texas Death” matches, similar to the Last Man Standing stipulation. War Games, Elimination Chamber, Ultimate X and Punjabi Prison matches all have roots in this “war to settle the score” philosophy.
After a rivalry has built to an unavoidable explosion, the only way to settle differences between the factions might be a hardcore match. This is a great way to put an exclamation point on the feud and clearly end the storyline arc so that each participant can move on to a new opponent with the battered foe now in their past. When used for this purpose, I completely understand the need and value for such matches, provided they are few and far between, and they never amp up the violence for mere shock value – there must be context to the content.
But the original ECW, and many companies since their demise, leaned on this style as a way to differentiate themselves from the average promotion, consistently offering a majority of hardcore matches. I realize ECW had a division of great wrestlers like Guerrero, Malenko, Benoit, and Jericho, and they also brought cruiserweights like Mysterio, Psicosis and others into the US spotlight. But let’s face it – there was a lot of violence for the sake of violence in the Philly-based promotion during its heyday.
I find it humorous that Heyman and company considered ECW a renegade, anti-establishment upstart compared to the bigger promotions of the day because of their heavy reliance on garbage wrestling. After all, sanctioning violent brawl after violent brawl was nothing more than a choice they made. Contrarily, it took a certain bravery to let mat technicians tear it up in standard rules matches for 20 minutes in front of US audiences back in the mid/late 1990s. It also took guts to allow relatively tiny masked men to flip and fly around an ECW ring, and to introduce this Lucha Libre style to fans who’d been conditioned to accept punch-and-kick offense as standard American professional wrestling fare.
But having guys powerbomb each other through flaming tables, or grab cheese graters, staplers, frying pans, canoes, and God knows what else from rabid fans and attack each other with them was neither innovative nor cutting edge; it was stupid. It doesn’t make a promotion a maverick to have its performers mutilate each other night after night for no valid storyline reason.
For one in 1,000 wrestlers, a strong reliance on excessive violence can work out beautifully for their character, even as it destroys the performer’s body. Take Mick Foley. Whether you prefer to think of him as Cactus Jack, Mankind, or even Dude Love, Foley WAS a solid wrestler, and had an amazingly keen ability to construct a story along with his opponent while taking the crowd on an emotional roller-coaster ride. When he did utilize the hardcore antics for which he became so well known, it was normally within the logical framework of the match, and emphasized the drama of the moment. Foley did not routinely take short cuts or blade himself to save crappy matches or add drama where none existed. He was better than that.
But so many idiotic, aspiring young wrestlers have heard the story of Foley’s legendary house-dive and believe that this contributed to him becoming a three-time WWF champion, which is misleading at best. In his autobiography, the Hardcore Legend himself urges kids who wish to follow in his footsteps to join their high school wrestling teams to learn discipline, balance, respect, and develop a foundation of wrestling knowledge. What he doesn’t do is encourage them to bust fluorescent light tubes over their buddies’ heads in some ridiculous backyard wrestling federation.
For every Necro Butcher who does manage to earn himself a paycheck by being nothing more than the resident lunatic on the roster, there must be hundreds or even thousands of kids out there ravaging themselves for $25 a night in front of 30 fans in some disgustingly bloody ring, and it just isn’t worth it. One wouldn’t try to become a pro baseball player by only practicing running headlong into the outfield fence to catch a fly ball, nor should one think that eating flaming chair shots and enduring slams onto piles of thumbtacks is the way to learn the art of professional wrestling.
Terry Funk has long been know for his crazy hardcore matches and high threshold of pain, but it’s important to note that like Mick Foley, Funk has all the skills required to tell a sound story between the ropes, and that his choice to employ the hardcore style in the second half of his career is simply that; a choice. Certainly it’s easier to swing a chair than to execute a moonsault, and at Funk’s tenured age there’s no issue with him taking an easier path than his younger coworkers; the man’s been risking his health for wrestling fans for over 40 years. But when a younger performer chooses that route, he’s attempting to use the equivalent of career CliffsNotes, choosing blood-and-guts over learning his craft and the psychology required to develop a compelling story in the ring.
Let’s not confuse this garbage wrestling with brawling. There are performers with a less technical style, just as Rocky Balboa was more puncher than boxer before Apollo Creed taught him how to lead with the jab and duck-and-weave. Takeshi Morishima is such a mauler. He’d just as soon club his opponent down with forearm strikes or vicious kicks to the head as he would tie up in a wrestling hold, but for his size and power, this style makes complete sense. Kurt Angle, with his vast amateur background, leans more heavily on holds and throws than strikes, and again, this suits him to a tee.
Some wrestlers have developed a wonderful hybrid of wrestling and brawling, like Samoa Joe, Erick Stevens, and to a lesser extent, the Undertaker. Each has the ability to strike and pound or to utilize sound wrestling holds to varying degrees. The key is that their repertoire is not one-dimensional. They can plan ahead, counter their opponents’ offense, and get down and dirty when required.
Certainly there’s a place for the occasional ultra-violent match, but when that’s all a wrestler does, he’s a one-trick pony who only knows how to perform a small facet of his job. In this day of short-term late relief pitchers in baseball who only work the 6th through 8th innings, it’s no surprise that certain wrestlers “specialize” in hardcore matches. But the guy who can do it all, the utility player, will always be the more valuable member of his team.
As for the hardcore style, I would much rather watch Bryan Danielson and Austin Aries work a 25-minute technical classic than see Abdullah the Butcher jam a fork into his opponent’s forehead, but different strokes for different folks. Obviously the numerous promotions and performers who feature the hardcore style indicate there’s an audience for garbage wrestling the world over.
Vin Sanity is not categorized as a psychological disorder… yet.
p.s. – “A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience.” – Elbert Hubbard
