RIP Eddie Guerrero. In a time not so long ago, wrestling was dark, it was grim, it was filled with nasty feuds; wrestling had the potential to put you off your dinner. The sport of professional wrestling emphasized heated feuds with steel cage matches, hardcore matches, Hell in a Cells, and other match types (like submission, oddly enough) which inevitably lead to massacres befitting of the horror genre; the wrestlers would blade (or be cut open the hard way) to highlight the brutality, and to make the fans nervous.
While blood still happens in WWE sometimes, it's become a rarity. Generally it happens the hard way, and a doctor will see to the wound and clean it up so any pictures depicting events the following day won't be so graphic. While it's WWE's prerogative to keep blood to a minimum, I'm sure many fans feel a sense of disappointment when a doctor enters a ring to clean someone up. We still have the blood lust, we still want to see wrestlers covered in their own blood, and let's be honest, it looks cool.
Think about how many times Ric Flair bladed. Think about the submission match between Steve Austin and Bret Hart; would the match be as memorable if Steve Austin had no blood trickling down his face as he passed out? Would the transformation of Steve Austin had happened if he wasn't left laying in a pool of his own blood? It was Steve Austin's guts, his toughness, which got over with the WWF fans. Without Austin showing how much of a "Tough SOB" he was, the Attitude Era could have played out differently.
But then you have to think about matches when blading was done wrong. Sometimes blood will add to a match, other times it will take away from it. When done wrong, all anyone would be talking about is the amount of blood rather than the match itself. It's these matches I wish to find for you. I don't want to find matches everyone talks about and praises, I want to find bloody matches which went too far, and could have been remembered more by WWE had they not gone too far.
So bringing to you a one-off piece as brutal as a Ric Flair blade job, let's count down from #10. Please, bear in mind that it's hard to rank bloody matches, it's not like I can go back in time and calculate how much blood was split, so please don't take the rankings too seriously. You may disagree with how matches were placed, but the placings are not as important as how horrific the matches were. I've tried to place the most graphic matches/moments nearer the top.
Of course, there are many other matches which were bloody and violent, but I chose not to include them because they are often remembered by fans. Flair vs Savage, Austin vs Bret, Mankind vs Undertaker, Cactus Jack vs Triple H etc. I also decided not to add the WMXX main event, because the match was more about the wrestling action than the blood. Also I might make another article (in the near future) highlighting the bloodiest matches outside of WWE, and go in to detail on the Muta Scale. I'll save that for another day though, and let you get to the videos.
10
The Blacktop Bully vs. Dustin Rhodes - King of the Road match - WCW Uncensored 1995
Ok, so I'm going to add this one. It's not WWE, but I came across it while researching. Apparently both guys were fired by WCW for blading during the match. An example of two guys losing their jobs because they wanted to add something to this horrendously bad match type. Dustin Rhodes would inevitably go on to be Goldust in the WWF, and yeah, who's Blacktop Bully?
9
The Undertaker vs. Brock Lesnar - No Mercy 2002 - Hell In A Cell For The WWE Championship.
There's more than one reason to forget this. Obviously the recent Hell in a Cell match between them saw WWE completely ignore the previous encounter and how it ended. Needless to say, while the match isn't a classic (probably 3 out of 5 at best), the blood is as much as you will find in any Hell in a Cell. Lesnar, Taker, and Heyman bled on this day
Just to top it all off, if you fast forward to the 30-minute mark, you can see blood on the camera lens. The match isn't fondly remembered, Brock Lesnar beat Undertaker at his own game, and I can only remember (back in 2002) feeling depressed because I wanted Undertaker to defeat Lesnar for the title.
8
Sgt. Slaughter vs. Pat Patterson - May 1981
While I wasn't alive to see this, it's an example of a bad blade job adding to a match. At the12-minute mark, Patterson launched Slaughter to the turnbuckle, and Slaughter hit his head on the metal pole, blading immediately. It was voted match of the year by the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. What does that tell ya!?
7
Bret Hart vs. The British Bulldog - WWF In Your House 5
Bret didn't blade often, so it was shocking to see Bret bleeding all over the mat on the outside. The WWF denied Bret bladed, but it's clearly visible at 14:10. Not the best match between these two, and the shots of Diana Hart are a bit much, but still a good contest between them in 1995.