I’m going to tell you something you might not be ready to hear, but it’s time you fully
accepted it. Selling Sunset is mostly staged and scripted. Krishell didn’t just get a job at an
estate agent’s one day, she’s an actress. Professional wrestling, however, is 100%
unscripted and real. That’s a fact. But in some corners of the dark web,
people like Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones I guess are peddling god damn filthy lies. LIES I TELL THEE.
That wrestling might just be predetermined. To them I say, you try climbing a ladder in a high
pressure situation. It slows you down and takes a really long time. Like, a really long time. Like,
ok, you can definitely reach that prize now. [IT’S STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT CLIP]
But just for an intellectual exercise, let’s look at the so-called evidence, where the secrets of
how wrestling really works were mistakenly exposed - in moments the audience weren’t supposed to see.
I’m Oli Davis hailing from partsFUNknown and this is 10
times wrestling accidentally exposed its secrets on air.
Before we get on with the list, I just want to give a shout out to your local home town. It’s
great, right! Now I’ve given you a compliment, it’s only polite for you to return the favour
and subscribe and enable notifications to always on to know first when our latest wrestling videos
go live. And like, and comment, and share this list around. All hail the algorithm.
Also, a huge thank you to our sponsor for this video, SurfShark - where they’re giving
our viewers 83% off and 4 months free if you click the link in the video description below!
Stick around until the end of the video for more on that.
10. The Invisible Hand Moves Drew McIntyre’s Table
No not the invisible hand *job* Don Callis, although if Don Callis
was under the ring here this would be an even bigger secret than I first thought.
At Hell in a Cell 2021, Drew McIntyre challenged Bobby Lashley for the WWE
Championship and they had a pretty solid match all things considered. One of the biggest spots
of the match saw Lashley slam McIntyre off the apron through a table at ringside. Ouchies.
Or maybe not ouchies! The move was filmed with
Bobbles throwing Drew out of shot. The camera then cut to McIntyre laying in the rubble,
where there was a hand sticking out from under the ring, sliding a chunk of the table under Drew!
We never actually saw the table break. This was in the lockdown era of WWE, still being shot with
no crowd in the Thunderdome. Drew had not actually taken the devastating bump to the floor we thought
he had but rather, it was all smoke and mirrors made possible by a lack of a live audience.
9. Referee Slides Becky A Chair
Sometimes life just feels a little bit out of reach. And by life I mean a chair
when you’re trapped in a figure four leglock and wrapped up in a ladder. But that is also
still how life feels sometimes. Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch’s
Last Woman Standing match at WWE’s Evolution pay-per-view was one of
WWE’s best main roster matches of 2018. The two women battered each other over the
SmackDown Women’s Championship but there was one spot that broke the fourth wall.
Lynch was supposed to break up the ladder-assisted figure four leglock by hitting Charlotte with a
chair. The only problem was, she couldn’t reach it. So the referee very clearly puts
his foot on top of the chair and slides it to Becky to free herself. Although,
given reports that nobody likes Flair backstage, maybe the ref just wanted her to lose.
8. Blindfold Eyeholes on display
Blindfold matches are never really good. I don’t know about all of you,
but whenever I’m watching one I’m like, hey, I wish the audience had blindfolds on too.
Am I right? Yeah, you’re right Oli, that’s a good observation, it’s a good observation.
[PACE IT LIKE IT’S A BAD JOKE, WHICH IT IS] The fans not being able to see sure would’ve
helped Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts and Rick Martel’s blindfold match at WrestleMania 7,
because while the referees are helping the wrestlers put bags on their heads
before the match began, you can very clearly see mesh eyeholes in Jake’s.
7. Sin Cara Trampoline Shown on Camera
The original Sin Cara, Sin Cara Uno, will likely go down in history as one of the
botchiest botchers in the history of botchdom. But this botch wasn’t actually his fault. It was
WWE production’s. Quick, Kevin Dunn, more shaky cam. The shaky cam fixes everything!
Sin Cara used to enter the ring by leaping from the ground all the way over the top rope. It
was supposed to give you the impression of his extraordinary athleticism, his near superhuman
jumping power… which is slightly undone when you see the mini trampoline he was using by the ring.
After WrestleMania 27, the original Sin Cara made his WWE debut, where the camera
showed him pointing to the ring and, well, there’s the trampoline. It’s right there.
Of course he was using a trampoline to do the spot,
but actually seeing the thing is like leaving in the wires holding up Spider-Man in a Marvel
fight scene. It kinda takes you out of it. Unless it’s Emo Spidey. I love that guy!
6. John Cena Drops His Blade
By October 2009, WWE was as deep in PG territory as a penis in your mum.
Mum joke. I mum joked you. They even avoided saying the word asshole, when Triple H described
Legacy as “like butts but not so much the cheek but more the little center part”.
But that PG veil was torn apart when John Cena dropped a razor blade
during his Hell in a Cell match with Randy Orton. Cena takes a bump
and right in the view of the camera a blade falls out and lands on the mat.
Crazily, the last guy to blade in WWE prior to this was Batista and he was fined $100,000 for it,
so seeing the implement - used by wrestlers to cut themselves in matches to pretend they’ve been
busted open by a move - was shocking, especially with it being dropped by the face of WWE PG.
The referee picked the blade up and it was never used.
5. Chris Jericho’s Insane Grip Strength
Chris Jericho likes to talk about himself. He has more gimmicks than the next relaunch of NXT, and
he’s been bringing up beating The Rock and Steve Austin in one night for about 15 years straight,
so why doesn’t he ever brag about his Herculean grip strength?
During his rivalry with CM Punk over the WWE Championship in 2012,
Jericho targeted Punk’s straightedge lifestyle. In one segment Jericho went to hit Punk over
the head with a whiskey bottle only for the glass to turn to dust in his hands,
resulting in Jericho just kinda splashing Punk with booze. The power of Christ compels thee. No,
Jericho didn’t have an infinity gauntlet. This was clearly a prop sugar glass
bottle - designed to safely shatter - which is preferable to breaking a real
glass bottle over someone’s head. Because that would be a murder.
And as if the angle being ruined by that wasn’t enough, Jericho slipped and fell over right after.
4. Amplifier Shown Under The Ring
Have you ever noticed that when you go to a live wrestling event the bumps are really loud? Like
louder than you thought they would be from watching on television? The reason for this
is WWE amplifies the sounds of the matches by putting audio equipment under the ring to
broadcast the noise through the arena’s speakers. On one occasion, though, they accidentally
let the fans in on this trick. At Bad Blood 1997, Sgt Slaughter made sure to shine a
flashlight under the ring to make sure there was no one trying to interfere in the first
ever Hell in a Cell match between The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels. In doing so, he shined a light
right on an amplifier that WWE had under the ring. This is probably the only time on television that
WWE has given a detailed view of what goes beneath the mat, unless you count that time
DX crawled under the ring into a mini universe of Hornswoggle and its mini People’s Court.
3. Chris Jericho Crash Pads
There have been many many examples of wrestling promotions using crash pads to make sure their
performers don’t get injured in major spots. The Undertaker chokeslammed Triple H to his doom at
WrestleMania X-Seven, which a replay then revealed as a nice cushiony crash pad. Jeff Hardy did a
huge Swanton Bomb onto Umaga off a TV truck at One Night Stand 2008, but then the camera moved some
conveniently placed crates to expose crash pads stacked on top. But the most egregious example
of this came with Chris Jericho’s swan dive off the Blood and Guts cage courtesy of MJF.
Now, nobody is saying here that Jericho should’ve actually taken that bump for real,
as he would’ve probably shattered as much as that fake whiskey bottle from earlier. It was
production’s fault for showing the crash mats so much! Unfortunately, with it being the climactic
spot, it became the main talking point after an otherwise excellent and emotional match.
2. Women Stop Wrestling During Commercial
The start of the pandemic was a weird time. Nobody really knew how to act in real life,
let alone how to produce a wrestling show stripped of 90% of its production
and a live audience. So Triple H just decided to make his version of the Tim & Eric Show.
Stone Cold cut a promo to a load of empty chairs on Raw and kicked Byron Saxton in the dick.
And Hunter joined commentary on SmackDown and colored in Michael Cole’s soul patch.
But the lasting moment from those early days was the very first match of the pandemic era,
of Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross vs Sasha Banks and Bayley. When the show cut to a commercial break,
with no crowd there live, the wrestlers… just stopped wrestling.
Not like ‘sit in a rest hold’, which is often the case during commercials,
it literally stopped. There was no one in the venue to wrestle for so during
the adbreak the women involved just hung out. This wasn’t their fault. The footage wasn’t
supposed to get out. But an international broadcaster accidentally aired the commercial
break - prompting WWE to then tell all performers to wrestle during the ads.
1. The Rock Promo Notes On Wrist
Scripted promos, in general, don’t work. They generally come across as robotic,
and when the wrestlers literally have the scripts in shot, it kind of takes you out of the
realism - like when Tucker was shown throwing his promo notes on the ground in a backstage segment,
Paul Heyman’s visible notes during an episode of Talking Smack,
and whatever this promo was from Aliyah where she looks down as often as Kevin Dunn cuts the camera.
Rock ‘The Dwayne’ Johnson doesn’t need any of that. He’s one of the greatest promos of all time,
arguably the most charismatic talker in wrestling history - so seeing his promo bullet points on
his wrist in a 2012 segment with John Cena punctured not only wrestling in that moment,
but the mythology of The Dwayne’s spontaneously electric persona from the Attitude Era.
You could clearly see a bullet point list sharpied on his wrist for a promo ahead of
his WrestleMania 28 match with Cena. It was so obvious, Cena directly referenced it. Rock was
visibly rattled by being called out, causing him to stumble and stutter the rest of his promo.
Professional wrestling’s trick up its sleeve had literally been exposed.
If Professional wrestling wore sleeves, that is. Which it doesn’t, because muscles.
Now here’s YouTube’s Adam Blampied with a message from our fantastic sponsor.
Can you think of any other moments wrestling leaked its secrets on-air? Let me know in the
comments down below because I’ll be replying to people from outta nowhere! And please give
partsfunknown a subscribe for more great videos - like my other list on 10 Times Wrestlers
Visibly Hated Their Own Matches! And dive into Adam Blampied’s playlist too. Jam that Jam.