10 SICK & TWISTED Wrestling Funerals
Sex, drugs and spaghetti bolognese as wrestling finds bizarre light in the darkest hours...
There's a certain fragility about this subject, not that the angles below or the men that booked them subscribe to that.
Death isn't just life's only certainty - it's the one that has impacted wrestling far more than it should have. Many of our favourites have passed, loads of them went too young, and plenty went in circumstances needlessly brought on by the myriad of wrestling's excesses. It's a tricky area to cover, unless you're a promoter looking for a ratings grab and an excuse to blow the props budget.
There is, perhaps, reason for such chaos at these events. It's possible that companies want matters to be so absurd that they trivialise the dark heart at each segment's centre. And rather than being frightened by the hyperbole in the title, ask yourself if you'd really want to see it done any other way.
WWE attempted to murder the Royal Rumble in 2014, but the funeral in 2015 was dullest sh*t imaginable. They then took seven years to book a wake and nearly cooked some of the guests when 2022's WrestleMania sign lit on fire. Funny online, it'd have been no laughing matter if things went wrong.
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10. Big Show's Buried Dad Becomes A Bodyboard
The most (in)famous of them all.
Underrated by some for just how much total f*cking carnage there was on display, Big Boss Man's entrance is almost as good as his iconic exit.
Barking insults through a homemade Blues Brothers-style loudspeaker, Boss Man's at peak popper level already before - and that this is still a sentence almost makes WWE's last 20 years justified - he chains the Big Show's Dad's casket to his old squad car and drives it away with Show on the back trying to rescue things.
There's something so endlessly fascinating about the the scene that's still so hard to parse. It remains almost as amusing on the hundredth watch as it was the first. The setting, the blue winter's sky, the bump Show takes as he ricochets off the box and onto the grass. Even Show's leather funeral ensemble. Something so grim shouldn't be so pleasing, but that could probably subtitle three quarters of the Attitude Era in general.