It makes a busy wrestling blog proprietor’s day when a stranger shows up out of nowhere offering a shrewd critical take on the art of blading. Please enjoy this piece by new contributor Kid Mankind, and be forewarned: there is blood.
There are three ways to bleed in a wrestling ring.
There is an accidental split of the skin – maybe a baby face landed a lucky hit on someone’s nose, maybe the jagged edge of a smashed table cut the back of a heel. The mess of Mankind’s face after his famous Hell in a Cell, Kenny Omega’s busted lip in the 2018 G1. It’s not all that common but not unheard of.
The second is blading via an obvious foreign object, often in a no disqualification context – scissors, fluorescent lights bulbs, thumb tacks, barbed wire – sharp for the sake of being sharp. Chigusa Nagayo and Dump Matsumoto’s hair match, Candice LeRae catching Nick Jackson’s shoe specially covered in tacks. These matches aren’t going to be on prime time cable anymore, but there’s plenty of them the world over. The argot for the amount of blood in the ring is the Muta Scale – so named for a 1992 Great Muta vs Hiroshi Hase match. Muta opens the match in red face paint – and Hase essentially slaps the paint off him. Muta later produces a knife from under the ring, and Hase turns it on him, reddening his face again, making the paint job real.
The third is stealth blading.
You bring a razor blade – the old kind, fine and sharp and neat, trimmed to size – into the ring with you. Perhaps it’s a scalpel blade wrapped in tape. Maybe you hide it on site. You take a hit in such a way you have a moment to hide, to draw the blade over forehead or hairline – lots of blood vessels, lots of sweat, so you’ll wear a crimson mask like Muta soon if you do it right – not a lot of muscle to damage, and it barely hurts. The skin of your face heals pretty fast. Certain older wrestlers have specially scarred up foreheads, because of this, because they made a practice of blading by stealth.
Hardway – cuts from a prop, a visible object – and stealth blading often happen on the same part of the body – it’s easy to show your face to the camera. However, they’re very different, dramatically – viewed differently, received differently by an audience.
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In 2004, Eddie Guerrero, universally beloved youngest son of the famous wrestling family, and JBL, a capitalist cowboy, stockbroker and former football player, had a grudge match.
JBL had allegedly caused Eddie’s 76 year old Mexican mother to have an in ring heart attack (let it never be said the entire Guerrero family were anything less than professionals). In the opening of the match, JBL inflames the LA audience with racist invective about Latinos. Eddie arrives in a low slung Cadillac to a huge pop. It’s an incredible, enthralling match.
In the last fifteen minutes, Eddie takes a chair shot, ducks under a table, and stands up pouring arterial blood. The audience loathe JBL, and it only increases their hatred when the clean cut cliche holds Eddie’s wet, red face up to the audience and grins. Eddie doesn’t give up, though.
“How much heart does this guy have?” yells a commentator, just before Eddie takes a top rope dive into a mat that looks like a Pollock painting.
Eddie disqualifies himself by slamming JBL with the championship belt. JBL crawls away, a coward, and Eddie gets the crowd’s approval and sixteen stitches. Days later, in a different match, he collapsed in the ring and ended up having to take time off. He’s not the winner, but he is the hero.
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I was trying to explain stealth blading to a friend of mine, a costume designer who’s never watched wrestling.
“Fake blood isn’t hard to make, and it can look pretty real, if you know what you’re doing.”
But it’s not fake blood, I said. I’ve never heard of a wrestler applying fake blood during a match. There’s nowhere to keep a blood capsule or a pump, in most wrestling costumes. A razor blade is much more concealable, more easily disposed, thrown out of the ring, kicked under the apron.
“Wait, so – are the injuries real?”
Yes – they’re also intentional. They want to show blood.
“But they don’t want people to know that they want to show blood?”
Yes.
“But everyone knows wrestling is fake.”
Yes.
“That’s weird.”
It gets weirder.
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Blading hardway, with a weapon, whether it’s an agreed on condition of a match – Penta El Zero versus Vampiro in the first Ultima Lucha – or a surprise reveal – The Great Muta and Kishin Liger in the late nineties, when Liger, unmasked and unhinged, produced his own huge knife from under the ring – is dramatic, terrifying sometimes.
It is, however, easily parsed. One fighter holds aloft a weapon – presents it to the crowd, so we have a moment of queasy expectation. Something large and showy works best – a bag of tacks can rattle down onto the mat, scissors catch the spotlight. Once we know that the weapon is there, they attack their opponent.
Blading made to look accidental is a fine art, and an odd one.
Stealth blading looks different to an actually accidental injury – unplanned blood drawn up hardway tends to be less photogenic. Sharp eyed smarks like me can use footage to pinpoint the moment of the cut, can sometimes spot the glitter of the disposed blade. While hardway blading is about the anticipation of the wound, stealth blading is attempting to convince you that this is an unfortunate accident, the outcome of the fight getting too hot, the simultaneous truth and lie of a wrestling match: that anything could happen.
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It’s the January 4th Tokyo Dome Show of 2004. Yuji Nagata, then the aging ace of NJPW, throws Kensuke Sasaki, a disloyal prodigal son, out of the ring. A ref hides Sasaki from the photographers as he rolls just under the apron, rolls out again. Nagata falls on him, hits him in the face for 45 seconds before the cameras get a good look at him – his face is bleeding, near the hairline. 
A minute later, after being slammed into a ring post, Nagata staggers out of view and reappears bloodied. Something’s wrong though, it’s different to Sasaki’s face – instead of the regular trickle, Nagata’s head pumps blood into a puddle with systolic rhythm. Like Eddie, he’s hit an artery. Soon, both fighters are covered in it. The refs’ white shirts are stained.
Red Shoes Unno checks on him, starts to count him out, but the Blue Justice, wiping a flood from his eyes, rallies, gets Sasaki in a submission hold and they just stay there, literally covered in blood, for minutes. It’s torturous and anxiety inducing, these men seem to truly hate each other.
Nagata wins by stoppage and the doctor runs in. Nagata remains the ace, Sasaki disappears for months.
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Some people think blading is a betrayal of the contract audience and performer enter into.
I don’t think the introduction of blood is any stranger or more fake than any other aspect of the product.
By adding the spice of real blood to a match you’re also introducing the real risk of blood loss, infection, extra slip hazards to a ring, through a careful bit of prop work – a kind of sleight of hand. It’s meant to be believable that you got this injury from the visible weapon, fist or belt or chair, not an actual blade – and frequently it was believed, even after the 1984 20/20 exposé where Eddie Mansfield, a former wrestler, calmly bladed for the news cameras.
He says in the interview “red means green”, that blood will get money. But we’ve always known wrestling is fake, that the blood is intentional – so why does it keep happening? Why do we pay to see it?
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In 1997, Steve Austin and Bret Hart had a huge ideological battle that ended in an I Quit match at Wrestlemania 13. Austin, a hero heel, humiliates Hart, until Hart spills him over the commentary table – the camera loses them and when we see them again, Steve Austin is leaking from the temple.
Hart puts him in a Boston Crab which lets Austin show his bleeding face to the audience as he reaches for the ropes, keeps reaching until he passes out. It cements both as tough guys who don’t give up, but Austin is the crowd’s favourite.
The one who bleeds the most is almost always the ideological champion, because although wrestling is about strength, it’s also about weakness.
But it can’t be forced.
If the wrong fighter bleeds, if they bleed in the wrong way, it falls flat.
I told my friend I’d never heard of fake blood being passed off as real in wrestling – I have since.
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A talented performer with the unenviable task of being the face of WWE, Roman Reigns has been so thoroughly pushed as an underdog champ, audiences hate him. This handsome babyface got booed. People walked out of his matches, or cheered his opponents, or yelled for other wrestlers. His Wrestlemania bout against Brock Lesnar last year was ignored by the crowd.
This happened to John Cena before him. The cable-era American audience demands choice in their entertainment, so any one figure presented to them as the new favourite is inevitably met with disapproval – it has very little to do with Reigns himself. But a ship as big as WWE is difficult to knock off course. They have to keep trying to get him over.
Early 2016, after a win, Reigns was attacked by Triple H – a heel manager turning on a face wrestler is a tale as old as the industry.
Triple H and Reigns are outside of the ring the whole time. They spill back and forth over barriers, use chairs and stairs – then Triple H drags him to the commentary table, and starts bouncing his head off the branded plastic shell that covers the microphones. There’s unofficial footage, filmed by an audience member standing just behind Byron Saxton, an announcer.
Reigns slumps over the table. Triple H moves away for a moment, to grandstand. Saxton steps between the unofficial camera and Reigns, slides him something. Reigns wipes a hand over his face, slips something under the cover he’s lying on – and when Triple H hauls him up, his face and hand are covered in red.
Thing is, WWE has an official policy against blading. It’s a fairly good health policy, to be honest.
People were already a little suspicious about the face of the company getting apparently cut, by the company man’s hand.
You can review the footage here:
https://www.facebook.com/nightsneakjames/videos/10153218436591571/?t=70
The coverage is a little too fast, too thick to be from a cut, even if he had been dosing himself on blood thinners, which some wrestlers have admitted to. No one liked Roman Reigns before, and no liked Roman Reigns after, and it’s generally agreed that what Saxton handed Reigns was a fake blood capsule.
The Austin and Hart match blading was not officially sanctioned, and Austin later reported that he was concerned he’d get in trouble from management.
This is entirely different to Reigns’ faux blading. What Reigns did was carefully orchestrated with the support of many colleagues – not just his opponent and Saxton, but the stage crew – less than a minute after the audience first sees red, refs in rubber gloves run in, to emphasise the seriousness of the problem.
Even though we know wrestling is fake, it’s not as fake as this scene. Even though we know wrestling is manufactured and manipulated, the bluntness of this manipulation is almost insulting. It likely would have gone better for Reigns if he didn’t try to show blood – because no one believed it, and people hated him even more.
Roman Reigns recently broke kayfabe in ring to announce that he has leukemia and will be taking a break from wrestling.
This serious illness, while no doubt real, was announced at exactly the right time to finally garner the audience empathy he never really had as the Big Dog.
The thing that audiences always want is truth. We haven’t seen his true blood – but now we know why.
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It’s necessary for our heroes to suffer. We can’t empathise with someone invulnerable, with someone who’s never been injured. Wrestling is traditionally working class – both the performers and audiences – and no working class person has escaped their job without exposure to injury, be it physical or otherwise. Blood is a physical injury for the performer, and a psychological one for the audience.
Is blading necessary? Absolutely not. There are many ways to sell a match. However, blood creates a viscerality, an instantaneous reaction that cuts past your logical brain, which knows it’s all for show, into the squeamish, scared, monkey part of your brain that knows: blood is bad. Blood is in us and it should stay there.
Wrestling is fake, but blood is real, and our reaction is real.
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In May 2018, NJPW fan favourite Tetsuya Naito bladed in what ended up being a promo for an upcoming match.
LIJ have just had an easy tag win over Suzuki-Gun, Naito walks through the adoring crowd. Suddenly, a masked man jumps him, throws him to the ground, drags him to the ring, beats him. He pulls off the mask – it’s Chris Jericho in black lipstick.
The camera follows Jericho out of the ring as he fetches the bell, and Naito curls up, shielded by refs, hiding his face. You can just see, if you slow it down, that he’s bleeding before Jericho slams him in the head with the bell.
This blading is double edged – Naito is beloved and powerful, the audience love watching him win and share his pain when he’s injured. Jericho, despite his appearance at Wrestle Kingdom, is still less known to Japanese audiences and must be further established as a legitimate threat – especially after his comic relief run in WWE.
By the time Naito gets backstage for commentary, he looks like a horror movie, but sounds like his normal self – selling his tranquilo coolness even more than usual, while Jericho storms around, swearing. It’s an excellent set up for a feud.
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Part of the appeal of making someone like Naito or Guerrero bleed is that they’re already well loved by audiences and the apparent savagery inflicted on them (by them) raises an audience’s ire against their antagonist. It’s a first act indignity that will make our hero’s triumph all the more meaningful.
Blading is a trick. That’s what so interesting about it. It’s a trick that still works even when you know it’s a trick.
For example, Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream, was infamous for blading, persisting even when it was controversial.
Sidebar: there’s a story that Dusty got in trouble with WCW in 1988 for telling the Road Warriors to put a metal spike in (or near) his eye after management had handed down a no blood policy. They fired him – but still aired the match, heavily pixelated, which made the thing look even worse. Red means green, red means views.
Though the Road Warriors match was hardway, Dusty stealth bladed all the time. It was almost a calling card. Look at galleries of gory matches and it’s Dusty Rhodes, right under Abdullah the Butcher, who carried a huge sharp fork to the ring and used the be able to keep poker chips in his scars, they were so deep.
So if he did it so often, didn’t people start to get suspicious? Wouldn’t it become less effective?
In an interview, Dusty once said, “It was that moment again, the thrill of that moment, the rush, the addiction to this business – to make it real, they want believe it was real, and it was real, for that moment.”
There is an almost transcendental realism to blading, belied by the fact that this was agreed upon, planned, scheduled. The materiality of wrestling is unavoidably here in the thing we all share – blood, and a reaction to it. There’s an element of method acting, of true performance – Dusty Rhodes is a little like Marina Abramovic, letting the audience see the performer as subject, as real, human and complex as the viewer, subject to their whims – the blood is real, the emotions are real, the art is real.
This is what makes Cody’s blading at All In so interesting.
It was incredibly, obviously, fake. More so than any other blading I’ve seen. Not fake like Roman Reigns – the blood is real! But I never, for a second, believed that Cody got cut by Aldis.
Cody pulls a full body splash on Aldis, rolls onto his side, crawls away and then? Hides his whole upper half under a table for over a minute. The ref calls a time out. Diamond Dallas Page runs in and talks to him while he’s still shielding his face. He hides again! Like a little kid! Page slams one of Aldis’ guys in the ring while Cody is hiding. It goes on for so long.
When he emerges, he catches sight of the belt driving this match – his father’s belt, that Dusty kept on his desk for years – and seems like he’s about to cry. The tears are more real, more noticeable, than the cut.
This was a match full of nostalgia, references to an earlier age of wrestling – not one that’s less fake, exactly, but the one Cody grew up in. They had a weigh in. Both men come to the ring with an entourage, both have wrestling legends on their side. The ref is Mr Montreal Screwjob, Earl Hebner. The blading, the time he takes to blade, the obvious shallowness of the cut, is just another nod to his father, the famous blader who made real hard times part of his mystique.
Whether or not it was meant to take so long, it does contribute to our meta-textual understanding of the thing. Cody, in the midst of a huge, excellent, silly show, in maybe the most serious, high stakes match of the night, is admitting that nothing here is real, that it’s all drama. That we can enjoy this, even when it hurts, even when it draws blood, because the performers have chosen to give us this.
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Again, blading is not necessary. I’m never going to advocate higher risks to a high risk workplace – I don’t like to think about the sanitary conditions of most wrestling venues. I doubt that every wrestler is as in control of their own choices as Cody Rhodes during All In, and until healthcare is universally accessible, I’m never going to be entirely comfortable with blading.
However, in the second that we lose sight of the performer and they arise, bleeding, wrestling as an artform is distilled. The risk is calculated and improvised at the same time, in the same moment – and the reaction of the audience is judged as more valuable than the performer’s flesh.
With stealth blading, the one who bleeds is not always the winner, but they are always the hero. They’re giving us themselves. Blood is humility, vulnerability, sacrifice: something human we all recognise and share. Blading will keep happening, and audiences will respond.
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