10 Harrowing Wrestling Matches That Are Incredibly Difficult To Watch

It doesn’t take long for Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit to put their feet to the pedal.

Almost immediately, they send themselves flying into the cage mesh. Angle then just as quickly catapults Benoit into the thicker bars cloaking the walls. Within minutes, after exchanging unassumingly vicious suplexes, both men find themselves walking across the top rope. Angle tries to escape the cage, but Benoit has other ideas; he rattles Angle with a stupidly dangerous German suplex. He maintains the advantage by hurtling Benoit into the walls on three consecutive occasions. Angle, as ever, is game to put the spectacle over, throwing himself into the mesh and his performance with reckless abandon.

Angle barely sells before dropping Benoit with an Angle Slam. He then ascends the cage. Match won. Only, it isn’t; he attempts a moonsault from the top of the cage, only to narrowly miss. “He gains nothing - nothing! - from the death-defying manoeuvre!” Paul Heyman screams on commentary. That isn’t strictly true; Angle hastened the neck problems that led to debilitating prescription drug abuse (and in turn ugly personal issues) in his later wilderness years.

Not to be outdone - he never could allow himself that - Benoit leaps off the top of the cage and flattens Angle and himself with a diving headbutt. Nobody will need to be reminded of why such a move generates a sickening curdle within the stomach, knowing what we know now about the state of his brain in June 2007.

Watching any Benoit match is uncomfortable for many. This is a particularly gruesome indictment of the style which eroded his brain - and by extension, his psyche.