Toby Klein and Necro Butcher Play Both Kinds of Music: Sadism and Masochism
Toby Klein and Necro Butcher Play Both Kinds of Music: Sadism and Masochism
To watch a professional wrestling match is to feast upon the pain of others.
This is true of every athletic endeavor, but wrestling is different in that it simultaneously is and is not real. Allow me to noodle for a bit. When a professional football player blows his ACL, he does so as a competitor, someone vying to win a game or a championship whose fate hasn’t been booked months in advance. When a professional wrestler tears his pectoral muscle, he does so as a “competitor,” someone who is part of a story that has been booked months in advance.
Only an idiot would say that one’s worth is more than the other’s, but it is difficult to replace a skilled football player, whereas wrestling is capable of pausing one wrestler’s story to focus on another. In other words, the wrestler’s injury is in service to a fantasy. It isn’t worth less than the pursuit of a legitimate sports championship, but when you buy a ticket to a wrestling show, you’re watching, and enjoying, the pain of others, suffering for the sake of narrative fiction.
There are levels of this. It’s easy to understand why someone does this in WWE or AEW, even midcard wrestlers who may never find themselves in contention for a world title — it’s a pretty good living, especially if you find yourself on television every week. Beneath that, you have the indies. When some death-defying spot or particularly brutal both goes viral, inevitably dozens of wrestling fans, all under the sway of one chud or another, will ask whether the risk was worth “a hotdog and a handshake” for wrestling in a high school gym. It would be incredible if those people were legitimately concerned about worker safety or the rate of pay on the independents, but what they’re doing is mocking a wrestler for trying to do something in service of their craft. That doesn’t stop them from watching, though.
And then, at last, we have the deathmatch. There are as many variations on the form as Avraham Avinu has descendants, from the theatrics of Atsushi Onita to the extreme horror aesthetics of Russian backyard wrestling. It asks the same question of participant and viewer:
How much suffering can you endure?
If you’re Toby Klein and Necro Butcher, the answer is a lot, maybe too much. It is 2003, and IWA Mid-South is running its King of the Deathmatch tournament, a weekend-long spectacle of blood and guts rivaled (in America) only by CZW. Every match in the tournament has a different stipulation, this one’s being the classic “fans bring the weapons” match, which is just as it sounds: there are dozens of weapons in the ring, crafted and brought in by the fans.
When I say “crafted,” I mean it. This match is most famous for the spot where Toby Klein hucks a VCR at Necro Butcher’s head, but there is some truly spectacular plunder in this contest, from various configurations of taped together light tubes to a lawn ornament Santa wrapped in barbed wire. All things considered, this is actually pretty tame for the stipulation, but given that this match set a bar for fans bring the weapons matches that fans and wrestlers have been trying to raise for two decades, you’ll forgive the lack of gusset plates, syringes, and boards with broken 7-inch records jutting out from them. (You do not have to forgive hollow-core doors. I will go to my grave believing that those suck, even if I respect promoters who figured out that they were cheaper than tables and achieved the same thing.)
There is a not insignificant piece of the wrestling fandom pie that wishes to be involved in wrestling to a larger degree than buying a ticket or watching from home provides. There are some who become wrestlers or referees or commentators or promoters, and then there are fans who have gimmicks, guys who jump the rail, and the crowd who hounds wrestlers from the airport to the hotel to the arena.
Somewhere towards the middle of that spectrum is the the guy who invented the water jug on a stick gimmick, the guy who brings $50 of LEGO to the arena, and the guy spending an afternoon fastening thumbtacks to a children’s baseball bat. We’re all twisted little freaks when it comes down to it, but I really admire this particular crew, who hear the siren call of “fans bring the weapons” and begin planning how to transport their makeshift torture devices to a high school gymnasium.
“Fans bring the weapons” begets the wrestling fan as sadist, and the wrestler as the masochist. I’ll go ahead and permit that for most, there’s no exchange of sexual energy, but this is a consensual act that begins with the anticipation that the things brought to a scene will be used, climaxes with the most ridiculous one, and concludes with a “finish,” which is, come to think of it, as much of a sexual euphemism as it is a wrestling one.
I have barely written about Necro Butcher or Toby Klein. What is there to say? One guy’s nickname is “Mr. Intensity” and the other wrestles barefoot in glass and thumbtacks. They swing wildly with their weapons, they punch each other hard enough to cause brain damage. They are performing for the pleasure of the IWA-MS crowd, who want both men to leave the ring more bruised and bloody than usual.
“This is what you want out of wrestling?” a concern troll tweets about something far less disgusting. Well, yes, if I can get it. This match is seven minutes long. Afterwards, I feel like I need a cigarette.