10 Wrestling Gimmick Matches You Won't See Again
Match stipulations swallowed by the ever-hungry maw of wrestling history.
Some gimmick matches are eternal.
As long as there is professional wrestling, there will be cage matches, battles royale, and no-DQ street fights. Other match types are signatures of a promotion or wrestler, like Hell In A Cell or WCW's War Games. Promoters, writers and agents are constantly seeking inspiration for the next Royal Rumble or ladder match - bouts that can turn an everyday feud into a money-grabber. But the fruits of their mental labours do not always become mainstays of future wrestling cards. Other out-there match stipulations are things of the past, consigned to the grainy video archive of history, and we shall never see their like again.
Some such match types aren't coming back because they are culturally objectionable and will not be accepted by wrestling viewers (or, perhaps more importantly, advertisers). Others are impossible now for reasons of pragmatism, (such as a match that requires more competitors than any wrestling company has under contract today), or is too dangerous to risk performers' health.
And many of them were simply so recklessly, inevitably, TV deal-threateningly awful that not even irony can ever permit their resurrection.
10. Electrified Cage Match
TNA tried to pull this match off at the Lockdown PPV in 2007, and immediately regretted it.
Team 3D (WWE's Dudley Boyz) and LAX (Latin-American heel hoodlums managed by Konnan) were to throw down in a match that was like a cage match ('Six Sides Of Steel' in TNA parlance) but even more dangerous. The cage would be electrified with 10,000 volts of sparkly blue agony, turning an already brutal match type into an epic of gladiatorial fury.
The major problem with the electrified cage match was the fact the cage was obviously not electrified, nor could it possibly be. Even an audience desperate to suspend its disbelief could not abandon basic logic when Hernandez grabbed the cage to steady himself with no ill effects, or the lights flickered and loud buzzing sound effects were played as Brother Devon was thrown into the steel.
The crowd turned nasty and booed the whole thing until the conclusion, at which LAX's Homicide botched a backwards fall into Team 3D's finisher, and the wrestling world agreed to never, ever try this again.