The Undertaker, often hailed as one of WWE’s greatest Superstars, recently shared his candid thoughts on the level of violence seen in some independent wrestling events during a podcast episode.
During the 1990s, hardcore wrestling gained popularity, particularly through Paul Heyman’s Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) promotion, where the use of weapons became commonplace. This trend extended into WWE during the Attitude Era.
On the podcast “Six Feet Under with Mark Calaway,” The Undertaker questioned the rationale behind independent wrestlers willingly subjecting themselves to pain:
“You can scroll through social media and all these wrestling sites, and there are just certain smaller independent outlaw promotions that are just doing violence to be violent. It’s like gore movies kinda, like how graphic can you be? ……. Without anything that makes any sense.
Like, ‘Okay, I’m going to go through a table, or I’m going to get hit with a lightbulb just for the sake of getting [hit] with a lightbulb.'” As The Undertaker pointed out, tables have become a staple weapon in wrestling over the past three decades, often eliciting intense reactions from the crowd when a wrestler is driven through one.
