10 Obscure Wrestling Retirement Matches You Didn't Know About
Featuring the greatest Can They Co-Exist WWE tag team you've never heard of...
No wrestler ever stays retired.
Some hold out for years and years because they, for a very long time, do want to preserve their in-ring legacy. They don't want their fans to think of some shambling arthritic loser when they recall their work. Shawn Michaels did not wrestle for eight years until he took the Saudi blood money. He retired for longer than most.
Mick Foley retired for all of a month in 2000, paying further tribute to Terry Funk, who was also allowed to renege on his promise by virtue of being Terry Funk. The Funker had of course promised to retire countless times, but could never resist the lure of wading back in. Nobody thought less of him because wrestling was always better with him in it.
The Undertaker threatened or depending on your disposition promised to retire at WrestleMania 33, but then, he never formally committed to it, did he? A man can take his hat and coat off whenever he damn well likes. This is America!!
Because wrestlers are inveterate liars who'd sell their own grandma for a pop, they don't retire; they simply work their last match until they can't physically get back in the ring.
Some of these technical retirement matches are thoroughly bizarre...
10. Kevin Nash
One could make the argument that Kevin Nash retired in 1998; after the explosive and controversial Starrcade main event, he simply stopped trying. He was decent value in TNA when that became his gimmick, playing with the idea that he had no interest in keeping up with his new X-Division peers, but irreverent comedy was the only thing of which he was capable.
Nash was never going to work a full-blown retirement match because that would require effort and care. The idea of a retirement match is for the wrestler to go out there, following a stirring, emotive build loaded with pathos, and do everything imaginable beyond their physical limits to give the fans one last show.
That sounded much too like hard work for Nash, and so it's fitting that he instead wandered into an indie you may not have heard of, did some spots standing up, and decided "Screw this" after the fact before proceeding to start a podcast and sell his own strain of cannabis.
For Big Time Wrestling - which actually draws a respectable gate and can draw top names from time to time - Nash in 2018 won a gauntlet match that also featured Fred Rosser, Flex Armstrong, two wrestlers Cagematch doesn't hold a record for, and the even more irrelevant James Ellsworth.
No footage exists of the match online, but Nash more likely than not walked in as the last man, threw a big boot, and didn't bump once.