Safety in wrestling is paramount. But accidents and mismanagement happen, regardless if it’s WWE, AEW, or any other promotion.. Pro-wrestling is intrinsically dangerous. There are no 100% safe ways to prevent danger. Risk factors exist inside and outside of the wrestler’s control.
Accidents result in pain, injury, or worse. Add additional violence from weaponry that will grate, pierce, dent, cut, or cause external or internal bleeding, the risks get higher.
AEW made various promises from its creation to be better than WWE. Part of this included the treatment of wrestlers and safety. In 2023 Tony Khan described AEW as “the safest wrestling company”.
Khan talked about how AEW had policies in place and a disciplinary committee to scrutinize mistakes. Such claims invite discord.
Sieve Out the Tribalism
Over time AEW has lost some fans’ trust and credibility due to a wider combination of factors beyond safety and violence, such as creative and business choices.
I’ve discussed elsewhere how AEW isn’t perfect. However, tribalism has distorted and amplified some narratives about violence and safety in AEW that slip into insidious pettiness.
A game of one-upmanship. We’ve seen this elsewhere. Whether it’s the careers of icon wrestlers, like The Undertaker or Sting. Or it’s moralistic point scoring using women’s wrestlers as game pieces. It makes it harder to discuss real concerns.
Perception impacts conversation. WWE has gained credibility and trust with its fans. In addition, with WWE’s PR machinery, conversations despite similar issues will be addressed differently by fans and the media.
Comparison between outrage for chair shots in AEW compared with the lack of outrage of CM Punk busting open Drew McIntyre with a toolbox does highlight inequality and unfairness. Regardless comparison doesn’t negate each company’s own responsibilities and track records.
I’ve dismantled the hollow criticism that AEW is dangerous here. It melts under the light of scrutiny like sugar glass. What’s left is fair criticism pierced and stuck in AEW’s reputation like thumbtacks in the skin.
There are two valid, overlapping categories of criticism. First, restrictions on excessive risky actions that have/could cause injury or harm. Second, the failure of policy and management to protect the heads of AEW’s wrestlers.
Dangerous Moves?
After All In, “Hangman” Adam Page sticking a syringe into Swerve Strickland’s face was an understandable talking point. Many of us can imagine the pain. Some of us have felt a dentist’s needle stabbing our gums.
Performatively, the concept worked. Skin pierced by needles and staples will cause real hurt, but that pain is localized and temporary at best. For us as viewers, it added trauma and shock, contributing to the match’s violent splendour.
And while needles are controversial, taboo, and risky, there were far riskier moments in this Lights Out match.
Nevertheless, in terms of serious long-term and possible life-changing injury, there were two riskier moves. The first was Strickland’s vertebreaker on Page was a nasty bump.
A move deemed so dangerous; that it was banned by WWE in the early 2000s. Page landed right on his curved spine; the back of Page’s head just avoided connecting with the mat.
The move looks dangerous and unlike the Styles clash, has never broken a single vertebrae or neck. As Shane Helms, who used the move as a finisher in WCW, put it in May 2020 on X how the danger’s “not [in] the move, it’s the execution.”
The issue of execution was Page’s position. Turned upside down, with no way to adjust his position safely, the hangman’s neck was closer to the mat. If contact with the cinderblock, real or fake, had been successful, it could have been serious.
The key word is could.
However, more undeniable was the contact between Strickland’s head and a steel chair.
Special Place in Hell
For some wrestlers and many fans, if steel chairs could die, they would have a special place reserved for them in hell.
Although early on, AEW enjoyed fanfare for its alternative use of hardcore violence, fans were not as willing to give the benefit of the doubt to one controversial event. Shawn Spears splitting Cody Rhodes’ head open with an unprotected chair shot.
Rhodes did not put his hands up. Rhodes told Spears to “swing for the fences”. The chair was supposedly gimmicked. It was supposed to be safe. Until it hit Cody. It wasn’t.
Chair shots to the head of Jack Perry handcuffed to the Blood and Guts cage, were described as gimmicked.
The intention of the spot, to present Perry as a defiant heel, a reference to ECW and Raven did not matter due to the safety concern being real from various individuals. From both fans and those in the industry.
Former WWE referee Jimmy Korderas released a video on X stating that even “shaved down”, a chair is still made of metal. It can’t be gimmicked.
“I’d take the gimmick chair shot over certain ‘safe wrestling moves’ any day of the week.” QT Marshall, X.
Marshall claimed that he revealed how the chair was made safe to Korderas in a private message. Equally, Spears’s chair shot was gimmicked. Shaved down, but the lip of metal, “a fraction off” as Spears told Chris Van Villet that made Cody gush.
Warped Psychology of Chair Shots
Joey Kaos of Santino Brothers Wrestling in 2020 posted a video on the school’s YouTube channel that sums up two truisms about wrestlers and steel chairs. In the video,
Kaos talks and demonstrates the safest way to use a chair to the head. The key word is “safest”. Kaos says multiple times (with expletives) there is no 100% safe way. The risk is the same.
Yes, there are precautions. You can step on the lip to flatten it. Yet metal to the head plus force, even with hands up, will hurt. Even if gimmicked.
The one used by Hangman Page against Strickland at All Out saw the metal seat ripped from the chair’s structure. Gimmicked, but the metal still collided with a man’s head.
The ultimate irony of Kaos’ video is he repeatedly states chair shots are wrong while showing the world how to perform them safely. They are stupid and risky. There is simultaneously a right and wrong way to do something that will inevitably cause harm to someone’s skull and brain.
Kaos defines this paradox as “we [wrestlers] are f###ing crazy stupid”. Wrestlers take risks emulating what they saw as kids and what looks cool. Kaos admitted he did the same.
If allowed, wrestlers will do crazy things. Just as Cody Rhodes tried to. On AEW’s Unrestricted podcast, Rhodes rationalized his desire by saying “I wanted to take chair shots to the head back for the boys.”
Despite the optics and pain, Rhodes said he would do it again.
Excess and Desensitization
I’ve discussed elsewhere that AEW has normalized what was once creatively special (here). The same can be applied to AEW allowing wrestlers to push the envelope. Debatable, too far.
How do you go further than thumbtacks or syringes in the mouth? Explosive sneakers? Attempted murder?
Stagecraft can only take so much of the bump. Add wrestlers who are naturally crazy stupid in an environment where some are given more creative freedom, there’s a valid argument to be made that AEW management should enforce some creative limitations or restrictions where appropriate.
Adam Copeland broke his tibia at Double or Nothing. In a match that featured barbed wire and various other spots, the fifty-year-old leaped from the top of the steel cage and landed awkwardly.
Given Copeland’s previous retirement due to his neck deterioration to the point of cervical spinal stenosis. This seemed an unnecessary spot.
Wrestlers be crazy stupid. Management’s job is to manage.
Concussion Protocol – Unclear or Ignored
Wrestling is as prone to Murphy’s Law more than other forms of sports and/or entertainment due to its intense and hard-hitting physicality. Accidents do and will happen. How wrestlers and staff respond to this is significant.
Head trauma linked to concussions is rightly wrestling’s biggest safety concern. Growing knowledge and awareness of CTE, the legacy of chair shots, wrestlers’ dying early, and the Chris Benoit tragedy. History AEW had time to learn.
All Out 2020 was derailed by a huge lapse in safety procedures. Sammy Guevara speared Matt Hardy off a scissor lift through a stack of tables. Overshooting the table’s edge, Hardy’s head connected with the concrete, knocking Hardy unconscious.
On his Extreme Life of Matt Hardy podcast, Hardy said he was on “autopilot”. After protesting and answering some questions, the match continued. In hindsight, Hardy said they should have stopped the match. Hardy called it a “learning experience” for AEW. A lesson not effectively learned from.
In 2021, Lance Archer vs. Eddie Kingston ended after Archer landed on the crown of his head. However, two other significant incidences followed where both injured wrestlers were placed in jeopardy. Grand Slam 2023,
Rey Fenix knocked Jon Moxley “loopy”. Fenix dropped Moxley on his head with a Fenix-driver to score the win. An unnecessary move. During a match on Rampage, Sammy Guevara’s knee connected with Jeff Hardy’s skull from a shooting star press. Guevara picked Hardy up for his GTH for the pin.
Although Guevarra was disciplined, three times in four years, the protocol wasn’t followed or was unclear. The risk repeated. A pattern became clear and rightly the concern deserved discussion.
More From LWOS Pro Wrestling
Header photo – AEW – Stay tuned to the Last Word on Pro Wrestling for more on this and other stories from around the world of wrestling as they develop. You can always count on LWOPW to be on top of the major news in the wrestling world. As well as to provide you with analysis, previews, videos, interviews, and editorials on the wrestling world. You can catch AEW Dynamite on Wednesday nights at 8 PM ET on TBS. AEW Rampage airs on TNT at 10 PM EST every Friday night. AEW Collision airs Saturday at 8pm Eastern on TNT. More AEW content available on their YouTube.
