It is Ballet
I always hated “it ain’t ballet,” ballet is pretty dangerous too! People get hurt all the time! Probably not a lot of ballets featuring Canadian Destroyers off a ladder inside the ring through four tables outside the ring though… perhaps there should be!
Swanton Lake
The Bushwhacker
Jon Moxote
Symphony in CW Anderson
The Rite of Spring Stampede
Dante Martin suffered a horrific injury Friday night at Ring of Honor’s Supercard of Honor. During the Reach for the Sky ladder match to determine the new ROH Tag Team Champions, Penta El Zero M executed the aforementioned Canadian Destroyer and the next thing I saw was Dante Martin’s foot being completely backwards.
It was as bad as the Sid Vicious leg break in late era WCW, the only thing I have going for me now is that I don’t have the morbid curiosity to watch it on repeat like I did when it happened to Sid. In fact, I’m just gonna tell you now if you came here looking for a gif of it, you’re in the wrong place. I watch a ton of horror movies, but they ain’t got nothing on this.
But Dante Martin is a grown ass man and understood the risk of doing something that crazy. Maybe it’s that I’ve been feeling particularly nostalgic for ECW recently, but wrestling has gotten a little too sanitized for my tastes in recent years. Some of it comes from well-intentioned people and you can’t argue with the fact careers are longer, injuries are taken far more seriously (especially concussions), and sports medicine has advanced significantly, but wrestling is inherently dangerous and it always will be.
A lot of this clean-up in recent years has been PR for WWE and their fanboys lapping it up. Vince McMahon made a ton of money running an incredibly violent, profane-laden, really gross show in the 90s and when that stopped being profitable, he cleaned up his act (lol) and went TV-PG. Bring the kiddos on down to the circus to watch the show where two years earlier, a grown man got his face shoved into another man’s ass crack!
Is blading a barbaric practice? Probably! Should Jon Moxley be allowed to blade to his heart’s content? Are you gonna be the one to tell him no? Cuz I sure as hell ain’t. Could a piledriver on the apron kill somebody? Yeah probably. But so could any bump gone wrong. There was a lot of concern trolling around Saraya’s return and some pretty nasty accusations leveled at AEW’s medical team, but it started feeling like people were rooting for her to get hurt so they could say “I told you so!”
Dante Martin took to Instagram while in the hospital saying “we are all good! Congrats to [the Lucha Bros] but know that we still want those belts!”
What a badass. If I suffered that injury, I would not be posting work stuff on social media, I’d be screaming “GIVE ME DRUGS!” to anyone wearing scrubs.