12 BRUTAL Wrestling Ribs That Made It To Live TV
When taking a joke gets taken too far…
The olden days of pro wrestling seemed quite horrific, didn’t they?
If you were allowed “in”, this usually followed a few months of getting the piss beaten out of you in training, so that those within the inner sanctum could be sure that you knew it really hurt. WWE legend and all-round bad guy Hulk Hogan claimed that his leg was legitimately broken by his trainer Hiro Matsuda, and astonishingly, given the source, it’s actually true - though you’d think, since he fought MMA fighters in the 1970s, that Hogan would have known how to reverse the hold.
Then, when you’d made it into the ring, the ornery veterans would stiff or even injure you. They wanted to make sure it all looked credible, you see - that, or they were sadists, and chose a profession that permitted them to live out their pitiful tough guy fantasies.
The schedule is significantly less brutal than it was during the advent of the cable boom. Within WWE, this was known as the ‘Killer Calendar’. The talent worked in excess of 300 dates, bumping on a ring with no give, thrashing their bodies to make money in the pre-rights fees days when house show gates were crucial to generating revenue. The medium attracted deranged, bored people who had little to do on those long, torturous days on the road.
These volatile conditions sparked the culture of “ribbing”, in which the malevolent carnies of yore would play pranks on their peers. A new word is required to convey just how awful some of this stuff was; “mean-spirited” is nowhere near accurate enough. “Terrorism” isn’t strictly correct, either - but it’s closer.
In the Stampede territory - in which there was virtually nothing to do in the barren Canadian outposts - it was not uncommon for the older wrestlers to spike a rookie with laxatives and superglue their buttocks together. Some, allegedly, even went as far as to ejaculate on their peers’ toothbrushes.
And, since wrestling is as bleak as the entertainment industry gets, this unseemly business made its way onto your TV screen. Some of it was mildly amusing.
Not all of it, mind you…