ECW has had plenty of laughable gimmick matches, but few have been as willfully barbaric as the Taipei Death Match. What it even had to do with Taiwan’s capital city can only be guessed at, but that’s another story. No one was booking airline tickets to Taipei City when Exl and Ian Rotten collided head-to-head in this bloodiest of entertainment matches.
The rules themselves were bloody enough. Before the match, both wrestlers would wrap their fists and dip them in glue, and immediately afterward they would dip them in broken and crushed glass. The Rotten Brothers weren’t exactly known for their incredible technical skill, so it was to be expected that they’d both hook each other with those fists a lot. And even those expectations were too mild: blood was soon pouring into the ring. The match itself was fully the gruesome mess that it was intended to be, and it showed once again how insane ECW is as a federation.
And it also showed how little difference there really is between ECW and the two bigger and safer wrestling federations. It was a typical circus match between two circus performers, where the safety and health of the wrestlers was sacrificed in the name of publicity (albeit negative publicity), and all of this was compounded by the passive-aggressive punishments of arena staff along the way. And all this only because the company had already made its audience insensitive to cruelty, and now had to go to increasingly ludicrous tricks to surpass anything shown before.
