Just when we thought it was extreme when we see someone use a chair or table, along come death matches. Despite the wishes of many in the professional wrestling community, death match wrestling is alive and well. It’s flourishing in small promotions like CZW (Combat Zone Wrestling) in New Jersey and in Japan like Pro Wrestling Freedoms (Freedoms for short).
Legendary ties
Death match wrestling is based on Terry Funk’s the no holds barred brawling, battling style. It utilizes everything from baseball bats, broken glass (including going through windows), luminescent light bulbs, and barbed wire — sometimes the barbed wire is in place of the ring ropes. It’s as far from the cartoonish landscape most of us have become accustomed to seeing on television weekly, and that’s part of the appeal.
The wrestling community and fans generally look down on death match wrestling, claiming that the performers use the violence to replace their lack of wrestling skill. It’s a comfortable thought for many, but it’s completely wrong. Some of the greatest legends like Mick Foley and the aforementioned Funk came from this. Another that’s not well known in America is Atsushi Onita. A legend in Japanese wrestling, he took Terry Funk’s style and adapted barbed wire, glass, and pyrotechnics.
Onita explained to Damien Ford in the documentary The Wrestlers, that he had been working on Terry Funk’s farm for a week and they were putting up barbed wire fences. He said he “eventually became friends with barbed wire.”
Before Onita introduced death match wrestling in Japan and added his ideas, there was no blood in Japanese wresting. It’s a cool claim considering the Japanese Strong Style that is known to be harder hitting and no one being interested in taking it a little further. He made an interesting point in equating death match wrestling to hard rock and punk music. Both require a great deal of skill that matches other forms of music need, and they’re not afraid to stand up and give an alternative setting.
The stigma
As mentioned above, death match wrestlers are seen as inferior, relying on blood and guts to cover their supposed lack of ability. While they’re extremely skilled, they are a group of people like any group of people, there are always good and bad performers in the mix.
Many wrestlers in this genre are accomplished wrestlers, they just prefer death match wrestling for various reasons. Sometimes, established Indie stars like Shane Strickland take part because “people don’t expect me to.” It’s not violence for violence’s sake as many think. In fact, without death match wrestling, there wouldn’t have been an ECW, the WWE wouldn’t have won the Monday Night Wars without ECW’s influence, and WCW may have folded by now. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a good or bad thing.
Given the rebellious mindset and the entertainment it provides, death match wrestling is alive and will be for a long time.
To paraphrase Onita, “Often, we don’t remember the beautiful things, but the shocking and surprising stay with us.”
