The 8 Most Insane Moments in Professional Wrestling

They say only the good die young, but then, they're forgetting about wrestlers whose hard lifestyles lead to early cardiac arrests. But, speaking of arrests, the late prison guard/wrestler Big Boss Man took his heelish tactics so far across the line into over-the-top cartoonish supervillainy in his feud with the Big Show that he will live forever in the hearts of wrestling fans.

When it became known that the Big Show's father was terminally ill, the Boss Man turned it to his advantage by having a fake cop inform his opponent that his father had died, thus winning a match by forfeit.


Soon after, Big Show's father really did die... and that's when the Big Show/Boss Man feud became equal mixtures of completely awesome and totally insane. The Boss Man upped the ante by crashing the funeral, running down Big Show with a police car, then tearing all over the cemetery with the grieving giant clinging to his father's casket chained to his trailer hitch.


If ever a scene deserved to be sped up and set to the Benny Hill theme, this is probably it.

And, though the feud would never get as spectacularly crazy as dragging the casket of a man's father's corpse around a cemetary in the Bluesmobile with the bereaved clinging onto it for dear life, we swear to God, it still managed to get worse. Boss Man followed up his funeral crashing with an impromptu performance on live television holding the Big Show's father's golden watch, which he'd bequeathed to his son as a family legacy. The Boss Man smashed it to powder on an anvil:


Then, during a frank interview with Big Show's mother on live television via a satellite feed (apparently she hadn't been paying attention at the funeral, as she never questioned the Big Boss Man's press credentials), he grilled the poor woman until she tearfully admitted Big Show's illegitimacy.


Having gotten the dirty truth from the teary-eyed widow, Boss Man spun around triumphantly to the camera and stated for the record: "The Big Show is a dirty bastard, and his Momma said so."

The Big Show/Boss Man feud has rightfully entered wrestling lore for the fact that not once, from the start of the feud to its conclusion weeks later, did it fail to be ravenously, dog-barkingly insane. Seriously, even when Big Show finally beat the Boss Man in a wrestling ring weeks later, did he really come out of this ahead? After a dude's desecrated your father's corpse, destroyed every possession he bequeathed you in his will, then proved your bastardry on live TV, it's a little hard to consider it just punishment to give the guy a chokeslam and get a fake gold belt for your trouble.

Long before he played Detective John Munch on Law and Order: SVU, Richard Belzer learned the hard way that Hogan knows best.

In 1985, the Belz hosted a cable talk show on which Hulk Hogan and Mr. T appeared to promote the inaugural Wrestlemania. After making several cracks about the scripted nature of professional wrestling, the hipper-than-thou comic insisted Hogan demonstrate a hold on him.


Hogan gently applied a front facelock to the spindly host, who thrashed around briefly, went limp, and then fell heavily and struck his head when released. The show cut to commercial. When it returned, Belzer wasn't there.


Instead, a producer joined a shaken Hogan (and an increasingly testy Mr. T) to explain what had happened. Though contrite, Hogan nevertheless literally added insult to injury by explaining that he'd applied the simplest hold he could think of, one that should have been harmless to a normal, healthy adult, but he'd failed to account for the fact that Belzer had obviously never exercised in his life.