If you didn’t catch episode one, welcome to 31 Days of Deathmatches. This is an advent calendar-style countdown to Halloween offering you a door of deliciously gory wrestling per day. Our trip to the spookiest day of the year will take us around the world and through time. This will chronicle some of the most significant deathmatches throughout the years but will mostly consist of my absolute favourite barbed wire bouts and glass shattering matches. Without further ado, let’s open the next door.

We’ve all heard of backyard wrestling. Be it through gifs, the old TV and DVD content from the self-titled Backyard Wrestling or from the wealth of content on YouTube. A common guilty pleasure of mine is to look on YouTube for Backyard Wrestling promotions and check out the content they are producing. Now I know wrestling comes with a big, “don’t try this at home” warning but this is often ignored a lot of the time. Let’s face it, some of the biggest wrestlers have found their footing through backyard wrestling and experimenting. Even I used to practice the art of wrestling on a trampoline with a mate. You have no idea how high you can bounce from a trampoline Chokeslam.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9M9VUSBnhY]

My first taste of backyard wrestling came from a game, Backyard Wrestling, Do Not Try This at Home. I had found a compilation of it on YouTube and was shocked by the ridiculous nature of the game and ended up seeing actual backyard wrestling on YouTube. This led to a rabbit hole of YouTube-based promotions that culminated in the ultimate find, CHW Backyard. These guys, though I shouldn’t praise their often dangerous and silly matches, were at least trying to properly ape the product they were after. They had wild matches and quite often had proper titles, feuds and characters… all to the quality you’d expect from a backyard promotion. It wasn’t particularly great but it was entertaining and they certainly weren’t afraid of bringing their deathmatch game. They have now since ceased filming.

These days the spirit of Backyard Wrestling is still kicking with other promotions and things like Grim’s Toy Show. We also have Twitter icon and new wrestler Super Humman fucking all the shit and doing daft stunts. It’s stupid and dangerous but my god is it fun to watch. That might make me a terrible human but I think backyard wrestling has a place in the world. It’s a breeding ground for potential talent, a way to practice, train, learn from mistakes and even make a name for yourself. Deathmatch companies sometimes have throwbacks to this type of thing, CZW’s TOD18 had a distinct backyard feel, IWA Midsouth often had that spirit of danger and let’s not forget that GCW had an entire show dedicated to backyard BS. I know it might be wrong but it’s hard not to watch people try to perform the things they see on TV.

Come back tomorrow for your next deathmatch treat!

Images courtesy of CHW YouTube, Backyard Wrestling Trailer   Video courtesy of Super Humman, CHW YouTube

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