Coming out of this past Sunday’s WWE Night of Champions pay-per-view event, there was a throughline to the big news stories: Wrestler safety. On the undercard, we saw the latest in the series of recent fan run-ins/attacks on wrestlers, leading to the fan in question getting arrested. In the main event, Sting suffered some kind of neck injury taking a turnbuckle powerbomb from Seth Rollins, and it was bad enough that they quickly went to the finish. On the surface, they’re separate problems, but the safety issue ties them together. WWE already appears to be increasing security to deal with unruly fans, so we’ll set that aside for today.
Sting’s injury gave me a lot of pause about both WWE using older wrestlers (especially in a main event position) and the type of moves they allow. Sting is in fantastic shape for a 56 year old man, but he’s still a 56 year old man. The buckle bomb, as Seth Rollins normally does it, is relatively safe, and it looks that way, too. Just look at how Rob Van Dam took it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCPso908-68
The goal is to come down as parallel to the ring post as possible, the way Van Dam did. Personally, I always thought the move was kind dumb because of how obviously Rollins is trying to protect his opponent. If you want the move to look “good,” you do it the way guys like Ricky Marvin did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2u7oWHdV24
Of course, that’s clearly  many orders of magnitude more dangerous than the way Rollins usually does it. If there’s no real middle ground and the safer version looks ineffectual, why do it in the first place?
Sunday at Night of Champions, Sting hit the turnbuckles much more folded over than Van Dam did in the first example. This type of newer spot that uses the areas of the ring you’r not supposed to bump on require incredible body control and timing ven by pro wrestling standards. If I had to hazard a guess, maybe a 56 year old man who barely wrestles anymore doesn’t have the reflexes to ever take the buckle bomb correctly. That’s nothing against Rollins, and he could very well have done everything on his end correctly, but my gut is that whoever produced the match for them should have nixed that spot. Maybe it was just a miscommunication and Sting could hav taken it safely, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Eo-rpv4gfA
Sting’s injury reminded me of how a couple months ago at Battleground, for whatever reason, the show was full f wrestlers taking bumps on the ring apron. Apron bumps were popularized on the independent scene in the IWS promotion in Quebec where Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn first made a name for themselves. The whole point is that everyone knows it’s legitimately unsafe (again, but relative standards) to bump on the apron because of the lack of give. It’s just a cheap pop, especially when it happens repeatedly on the same card, and Battleground showed a surprising lack of continuity in WWE when it came to limiting those spots. Like with a man nearing his 60s taking a buckle bomb, it’s hard to believe it happened.
Of course, there’s also the question of whether or not someone Sting’s age should even be taking bumps, doing dives etc. I hesitate to say they shouldn’t wrestle at all because you can work a simple, safe match, but Sting being expected to work a 2015 WWE main event style match with modern indie influences was not smart. He’s a beloved legend who still looks really athletic doing his trademark spots and should not have been put in that position when something safer would have sufficed.
After thinking about it for a few days, my gut says WWE needs to b more diligent about cutting guys off and not letting them wrestle past a certain age. Jerry Lawler was, by all appearances, an ageless freak of nature who could wrestle forever until his heart stopped right after a match on Raw. Ricky Steamboat suffered a brain bleed much worse than most fans realized after the 2010 angle where the Nexus attacked him. Hulk Hogan, who has no business taking a bump these days, took one on the floor at WrestleMania, though he may have gone into business for himself on that spot.
And that’s is really part of the problem: You can’t guarantee that they’ll agree to work a restricted style while they’re amped up in the ring. WWE has been pretty careful as of late with how they’ve used older wrestlers, but they’re in a business where they can never be too careful.
