10 Times TNA Went Further Than The WWE Attitude Era
6. Some Of The Most Wicked Chair Shots In Wrestling History
Contrary to popular belief, there was an awareness of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) before Chris Benoit's brain was found to have an advanced form of dementia that scanned as brown bumps, which, per head of neurosurgery at West Virginia University Julian Bailes, were "actually dead brain cells".
A primitive diagnosis of the condition was named "punch-drunk syndrome" and later "dementia pugilistica". CTE itself was coined well before 2007.
All of which is to state that there were significant, documented reasons not to encourage wrestlers to smash each other via unprotected steel chair shot in the head with sickening force throughout the Attitude Era - in addition, of course, to common sense. WWE cannot claim naivety in retrospect.
Nonetheless, the spot was over, so it happened all the time. That is no exaggeration; watch any episode of Raw in that time period, and you will hear the sound of a firing squad staggered over its two-hour duration. The worst chair shot was actually unloaded during the "Ruthless Aggression" "era", in which Undertaker cracked Kanyon with something closer to a hate crime than a wrestling spot, but TNA has even those Kane/Mankind exchanges beat.
In one particularly disturbing spot, two days after the suicide of Chris Kanyon, Homicide blasted Rob Terry full-force in the head. The resulting image was sickening; Terry looked like Katsuyori Shibata in his last match.
Sometimes it's easy, with the passing of time, to justify AEW's ultra-rare use of the chair shot, which seems to be an annual occurrence at Blood & Guts.
Other times, you watch this clip.