10 Harrowing Wrestling Matches That Are Incredibly Difficult To Watch
5. Bret Hart Vs. Terry Funk - WCW Thunder January 6, 2000
If WCW was a C-list organisation by the time the millennium began anew, Thunder was a Z-list show - an invariably listless inconvenience demanded by the network to cash in on WCW’s popularity. The irony is profound. The dramatic irony in this match, however, is almost unbearably tragic.
Bret Hart controls the opening third, sending Terry Funk careening into the guardrail and braining him in the forehead with a steel chair. Oddly, Hart’s mouth is held agape throughout.
Funk gains control as the match approaches the halfway point. He sends Hart hurtling out of the ring, and sends a steel chair hurtling towards his skull with a similar pace and obliviousness. This sends Hart reeling; his face becomes a grotesque approximation of Munch’s The Scream, his legs wobble as if beset by a video game glitch. Funk loads him into a laundry basket, and sends him straight back out. Hart, of course, lands on his head. The retroactive cautionary tale almost demands the sickening pathos. Jeff Jarrett runs interference on Bret’s behalf, but accidentally whams him with the baseball bat ever-present of the time. Worse than the unintended tragicomedy is that much of the action doesn’t even make it to the screen; the camera switches to David Flair’s swerve turn. If ever four words defined Vince Russo’s WCW...
Hart didn’t know it at the time, but he had already suffered a career-ending concussion at the hands of Goldberg days prior. This acts as a devastatingly grim epilogue, and the show on which it was presented is an appropriate indictment of the wrestling beast. Hart’s health was endangered on a show as frivolous as it was unpopular.