9 Worst Botches In ECW History

And Sabu? He’d be just fine, luckily. The real life Terry Brunk wrestles to this day at the age of fifty, despite a plethora of injuries across his violent, bloody career, including a second broken neck four years after the Benoit accident, when taking a Taz-Plex through a table and landing badly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsFDSlSohC4

That’s not all, though. Sabu broke his jaw mid-match, wrapped his head in tape and continued to the prescribed finish. He broke his ribs in a match with Mick Foley as Cactus Jack, ripped his bicep open on barbed wire in a match with Terry Funk… and those are just the best known injuries. He’s wrestled with broken fingers and knuckles, ripped and burned skin, crazy-glued and jaggedly stitched himself back together and kept going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqtzQAV0XiE

So many of these injuries were caused by moves that went wrong in the ring that it’s difficult to know where to begin. There’s even an argument to say that some of these mistakes aren’t really botches… after all, this is the Suicidal, Homicidal, Genocidal, Death-Defying Maniac we’re talking about. Sabu’s gimmick was an unhinged, savage recklessness, sometimes legitimately terrifying opponents as well as audiences. His uncle was the original Sheik, Ed Farhat, and he trained him to be an equally frightening mute ‘foreign devil’. Imagine a highflying Abdullah The Butcher, crashing through tables and into barbed wire and flames with a grim, dreadful determination, sometimes taking his enemy with him… sometimes not.

It’s a testament to the man’s dedication to his gimmick that botches were as much a part of it as successfully applied moves – and that he inspired no less than three different ‘Sabotchamania’ video compilations, with nearly half an hour of wild, abandoned (and botched) mayhem recorded for posterity. Never as sloppy as he appeared, but always fiercely committed and individualistic, Sabu may exemplify the spirit of ECW more than any other man in history… more even than wrestling’s mad scientist, Paul E. Dangerously himself.

What’s your favourite story of botching in Extreme Championship Wrestling? Tell us all about it in the comments!