Hello You!
Back to working my way through my Smart Mark Video On Demand splurge from a couple of years back, as we take a look at Tournament of Death 16. I really have no idea why I purchased this as Deathmatch wrestling isn’t really my thing, but I can only assume that it was because I felt like broadening my horizons a little bit and taking myself out of my comfort zone.
There’s really only one Deathmatch styled show I’ve ever watched in full and that’s the King of the Deathmatch tournament from 1995, which featured Cactus Jack, Terry Funk and Terry Gordy. I liked that show well enough for what it was, but that may have mostly been down to the fact that I’m a big Mick Foley fan and also because they broke up things up with non-tournament matches so it wasn’t just a cavalcade of people doing Deathmatch spots.
I may not particularly enjoy this, but I’m willing to give it a go because I am somewhat interested in the whole Deathmatch scene as sub-genre within the wrestling business. I really do ponder sometimes why the guys put themselves through this pain, especially as most of the time there doesn’t even seem to be a backstory to explain why. I get doing a big brawl with blood and weapons if it’s to blow off a long running and hate filled feud, but to just do it for the sake of doing it seems to fly in the face of wrestling logic (It’s why I didn’t really dig that Omega/Janella match as much as others did because they were doing stuff that could really mean something in a heated blood feud but were burning it off on a thrown together match for YouTube).
I’ve decided that giving these matches actual ratings probably isn’t going to work because it’s very difficult to actually rate them on any sort of scale because this style of wrestling is so niche and unusual, so I’ll just give my thoughts on each match and leave the stars at home for today.