10 Wrestling Finishes Performed On The Fly
4. So The Bruises Don’t Show
It doesn’t happen that often… but sometimes a match will fall apart because one of the participants wants it to. Pro wrestling relies completely on the cooperation between two or more parties to succeed in any sense. Ironically, the quickest way to destroy the illusion of competition that’s being constructed in the ring is for those parties to begin competing with one another.
One of the most notorious examples of this took place in January 1987 for Championship Wrestling from Florida, in a cage match between Lex Luger and the legendary Bruiser Brody. It’s a story that’s been trumpeted around for far longer that the internet has existed: it wasn’t ever officially filmed or televised, but remarkably video footage actually exists of the match, filmed from the crowd in the days before smartphones.
Placed inside a steel cage, a match between the perma-tanned Superman Luger versus the enormous wild man Brody should have been a guaranteed money-maker. Unfortunately, while it was a story that wrote itself, it still needed two men to tell it... and Brody simply refused to work.
The match began awkwardly enough, and soon slowed to nothing at all. After about four minutes, Brody refused to sell Luger’s punches - actually, it was worse. Betraying one of the cardinal rules of the business, Brody had simply stopped acknowledging that Luger's worked punches were even happening.
Luger clearly had no idea what to do. At one point, genuine hard man Brody just took him down to the mat and held him there, almost as if trying to prove a point, only to let him back up again. Finally, (seemingly after a quick conference with referee Bill Alfonso) Luger backed Brody into the turnbuckle, shoved Alfonso when he tried to step in and got himself disqualified, immediately vaulting to the top of the cage and heading backstage.
The story of what happened that night varies depending on who you talk to. Aloof, with the reputation of being more into himself than the business, Luger wasn’t well liked at the time. To make matters worse, everyone knew that Luger was jumping ship to Jim Crockett Promotions.
Some say that Brody heard the rumour that Crockett had asked Luger not to lose on his way out, and had taken offense to being played. Others say he did it on his own initiative to embarrass both Luger and the local NWA promoter, who he had beef with.
Still others say that Luger simply ran from the ring because he’d seen that the terrifying Brody, a man infamous for going into business for himself, had razor blades taped to his knuckles. Alfonso, although far from a reliable source these days, insists that Luger, used to working the same babyface hero match over and over, didn’t like being manhandled and left the cage in a fit of pique.
Luger himself claims that he spoke to Brody after the match and the big man shrugged it off, saying the match just wasn’t working for him. Whatever the true story is, it’s an object lesson in how bad wrestling can get when one performer refuses to collaborate with another.