WWE's Punjabi Prison Was Born From An Approved Barbed Wire Deathmatch Pitch

Nowadays, when you say the words exploding barbed wire deathmatch to wrestling fans, the first thing they think of will probably be the disastrous one that happened in AEW last year. Kenny Omega and Jon Moxley went to war in the violent match type, but it ended with a whimper. The explosive ending was little more than a low-grade fireworks display, and the illusion that anyone in or around the ring was ever at risk of being hurt was a million miles away from being achieved.

A Vince McMahon-Approved Deathmatch

It turns out more than a decade before, Vince McMahon gave the go-ahead for the match type to go ahead in WWE. Former WWE writer Court Bauer revealed as much during a recent episode of The Insiders. Bauer had shown McMahon clips of Atsushi Onita competing in the deathmatches in Japan. Eager to shake things up at the time, much to Bauer's surprise, the chairman said okay.

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McMahon instructed Bauer to get together with Kevin Dunn and piece together exactly how the company's take on the barbaric match would look. Two weeks out from when the match was supposed to go down, Bauer got a look at what Dunn's team had come up with and it was a million miles away from what he had shown McMahon. The writer described what they had come up with as more of a “Temple of Doom playset”.

The Inception Of The Punjabi Prison Match

No one ever explained to Bauer why the idea was changed so much. It was likely a case of the idea passing through 20 different filters and by the time it became the finished article, it was no longer the idea that was originally pitched. The idea Bauer was shown would go on to become the Punjabi Prison match, nothing like the exploding barbed wire deathmatch he had pitched, but infamous in wrestling circles for very different reasons.

For some bizarre reason, there has been more than one Punjabi Prison match. The odds of there being a barbed wire deathmatch in WWE moving forward are slim to none now, though. Not only because AEW demonstrated just how bad they can be if not done right, but also because Triple H has made it clear there won't be a return to blood and gore anytime soon in WWE despite the recent regime change.

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