The 10 Most Absurd Things Attempted by Professional Wrestling: Part 1 of 2 by Nick Bryans

This wrestler had a storyline where he dated a mop. He didn't make the top 10. Just think about that.

Watching professional wrestling will one day be up with Alcoholism and drug addiction in the category of ‘shameful vices’. I can envision sitting in a church hall in a circle of chairs, standing up and saying “My name is Nick Bryans, and I haven’t watched pro wrestling for 3 months now”, to raucous applause. Pro wrestling in theory is total rubbish; Greased up guys in latex pretending to fight in more and more convoluted ways for more and more convoluted reasons. With boxing/UFC, it’s very simple; person wants championship off other person, they fight. Whereas in wrestling that isn’t enough, and it has to be because wrestler A stole wrestler B’s wife at the father of wrestler A’s funeral, and the only way he can get revenge is through a Queensbury Rules match at Summerfest 2011, just after the dwarf battle royal. In theory it’s woeful, but c’mon, everyone is young once. And it’s no worse than other teenage obsessions. Like, I dunno, Transformers. Cars that turn into people? Do me a favour.

Wrestling ran out of storylines in, at a guess, 1996, and since then has been on a roller coaster ride of more and more absurd ways to convince people that two superstars REALLY, REALLY HATE EACH OTHER! At the rate things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised that if by 2020 you have a 7ft behemoth dressed as a ballerina wrestling an otter on steroids, in a ‘loser gets sent to Mars’, match. I should probably patent that idea. Just incase.

So here, we chronicle the 10 most absurd things ever attempted by professional wrestling.

10) 77 year old bikini model gives birth to a prosthetic hand.

Mae Young was a famous wrestler back in the good old days. Years later at the tender age of 77, she decided that she fancied a crack at a second run in wrasslin. Rather than pitch her as a veteran with experience, they decided to best way to showcase her talents would be as a mentally unhinged nymphomaniac that couldn’t go a week without getting her kit off. She crashed evening gown matches, bikini contests; all the time to the horrified responses of the audience. Feeling that her memory hadn’t been desecrated enough, they decided to place her in a relationship with ‘Sexual Chocolate’ Mark Henry, a young wrestler whose ‘gimmick’ can only be described as a sexually promiscuous bar of chocolate. He was part Blaxploitation movie extra, part sex offender, part mobile confectionary. Their relationship culminated in Mae becoming pregnant; only to 9 months later give birth to a prosthetic hand. A. Prosthetic. Hand. Someone explain to me the science behind that. I mean, imagine pitching that at a creative meeting; “So the whole two people fighting thing is very gauche these days. How about with we have a nudist pensioner hook up with a young wrestler with an incredibly offensive gimmick, and later they could give birth to, oh I dunno, a hand. Or something……thoughts?”

Watch Mae Young give birth to a hand

9) Child Prodigies

You know those YouTube clips you see of shit-hot child footballers, doing kick-ups and insane dribbling skills at the age of 6? Well wrestling has them too. Only naturally, far more mental.

Watch him, he’s amazing!

8 ) The Kennel From Hell

By now, every match you can think of has happened in wrestling, including such mentally confusing ones as a ‘leather jacket on a pole match’. A leather jacket on a pole? What are you gonna do to your opponent? Dress him to death?

Regularly voted as the worst concept for a match in the history of wrestling, the Kennel from Hell was an absurd concept that looked bad on paper and worse in real life. It was a ring, surrounded by a steel cage, surround by a larger cage with roof, and the space between both cells would be populated by ‘police attack dogs’. Sounds like carnage in your mind, but in reality it was a total mess. The dogs were kept on short leashes accompanied by the most boring looking handlers you could imagine which destroyed the mystique of the whole thing, the sheer volumes of metal surrounding the ring made it hard to see what was going on, and no-one had a fucking clue what the rules were. How does one win a Kennel from Hell match? Do they have to make one of the dogs submit? The two competitors weren’t exactly known for their engrossing wrestling skills either, and people got bored quick, with the only cheer coming when one of the dogs had a piss on the ring apron.

Watch the Kennel From Hell in all its glory here.

7) Terrorism Storyline

Wrestling isn’t known for its abilities to represent minorities. And by ‘isn’t well known’, I mean unable to do it to an almost comedic level. Shaun Davari was an Iranian/American wrestling figure, booked as someone tired of the prejudice he received due to US views on people from the Middle East post 9/11. So would they book him as an antithesis to show that actually, racist and stereotypical views of people from certain places are unsubstantiated and unfair? Would they fuck! Davari was booked as a complete nutjob, that would appear on screen going on anti-American rants and screaming at opponents in Persian (though it was described as ‘Arabic’ on broadcasts, as clearly wrestling head-honchos didn’t believe that your average fan would have a clue where or what Persia is).

Davari’s story culminated in a stunt due to be broadcast on the July 7^th 2005 episode of the show (you can see where this is going, can’t you…).  In the episode, during a Davari match, an associate of Davari known as Muhammed Hassan began praying by the entrance to the ring. Following this, 5 masked men appeared and began to beat and strangle Davari’s opponent in the ring. Davari was then carried away by the masked men ‘like a martyr’. That itself is offensive to just about everyone, but it was also due to broadcast on the day of the 7/7 London bombings. Now I’ve seen some fuck ups in my time, but that’s right up there with the worst of them. The stunt was cut from the UK edition of the show and later that month TV network UPN ‘Requested that WWE keep Muhammad Hassan off of their network’.

Watch the *slightly* bad taste footage here.

6) Custody of a Child on a Ladder……Match.

Life would be far easier if civil court cases were sorted in a wrestling ring. I mean, it would be utterly stupid, but certainly easier. Thankfully, stupid isn’t a word in the lexicon of your average wrestling promoter.

In 2005, a feud began between legendary Mexican wrestlers Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Junior. Former best friends and tag-team partners, Guerrero turned on Mysterio after a string of losses for the team. As the feud developed, Guerrero said he had a secret about Mysterio’s child, Dominik. It transpired that Guerrero had fathered Dominik, as Mysterio and his wife, Angie, had struggled to conceive a baby. Guerrero now said that he wanted custody of Dominik, as he was the child’s real father. Now before you ask if I’m mixing this up with an elaborate and torturous plot device on an episode of Day of Our Lives, this is professional wrestling. Let me just repeat that; PROFESSIONAL. WRESTLING.

So what was the solution to this? Would the child be allowed to stay with his mother and Mysterio? Would he be allowed to be emancipated from Guerrero and take Mysterio as his  father? Would social services deem Guerrero as an unfit parent due to his physical assaults on Mysterio? No. The grand plan was to have Dominik’s custody papers held 20 feet above the ring, and the first person to climb a ladder and retrieve the papers would be considered the legal guardian of the child.

Now what the actual fuck is the thought process behind this? Could this become common practice in civil arbitration? If I’m having a dispute with my neighbour over planning permission for an extension, rather than go through the courts, could we just have a cage match to decide the outcome? Or a Kennel from Hell match? Or even a leather jacket on a pole match? Would it be legally binding too? Because I can hardly forsee a judge saying; “Well you clearly have anger issues, are an unfit parent and child neither wants to live with you nor feels safe around you. But you did climb a ladder quicker than the other guy so…not a lot I can do, really.”

But never fear. Mysterio won and they had a big, mawkish family hug, custody papers in hand. Everyone loves a happy ending.

Watch the fight build-up (promo) here

Join us next time for part 2 where we count down the top 5. Believe me, it gets far, far worse.

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