During the Monday Night War, both WWF and WCW embraced the hardcore style that was being popularized in ECW and gave it its own division. This resulted in Hardcore Championships being created for each company that talents could fight over. One man who fit the profile of a hardcore brawler in WCW was one of The Nasty Boys, Brian Knobbs. During his time in WCW, which Eric Bischoff ran at the time, Knobbs went on to win the Hardcore Championship on three separate occasions.
During a conversation with Wrestling Shoot Interviews, Knobbs recalled one particular WCW hardcore match that went horribly awry.
“We were using the old stuff from the building,” he recalled. “So, me and Fit Finlay were whacking each other with them cast iron trash can lids. I mean, trash cans that were like cement. We were going through real tables. Then Finley almost got his leg cut off when I told him the one table that was made with Formica. He was lying there with his leg. Oh, it was the worst thing. I took my shirt off and put it over quick. I know right away to call people back. I couldn’t care about the kayfabe or anything because I was worried about him, you know?”
Knobbs noted that despite the gruesome injury Finlay had just endured, the “tough SOB” got back into the ring to finish the match.
“What he did was, I had a table lined up the night before, sold out Tupelo when I threw him through the plywood, he couldn’t break it,” Knobbs continued. “So he was so pissed off the next night he goes I’m getting through that table. So when I did it this time, when he hit, it looked like a bowling ball went through it. Just just a round thing. Here the table, the face of it was made with Formica. So it cut him up. So, it cut them like an axe, like somebody took an axe and hit him like this right where your knee and that is.
“So it was down in the bone, but it cut his nerves and everything. His leg was hanging open. So, he didn’t break his leg; he cut it off; it was, dude, I don’t even like thinking about it. And there he is cut open like that, and then I got cut from it just a little cut right here. And he was going; we were both in the emergency room together. And he goes, ‘No, just do what you gotta do no pain medicine for me.’ And I was like, ‘Give his medicine to me!’ And I only had a little cut here, you know?
“But I was really worried about them, and then the next day, I went face to face, and Jimmy Hart saved me, but I was going to punch Eric right in the face. Because they were making $90 million a year, and he wouldn’t buy us $100 stuff from the Home Depot where we’re not gonna hurt each other, you know? It’s still gonna hurt, but you get the right kind of trash cans and right kind of tables and all that stuff, and stop letting us just get old stuff from the back of these old buildings that are real, you know? Stuff that can hurt you. You know what I mean?
“And then Eric said, you can’t go blame this on us and blah blah blah, and right when I was gonna snatch him up, Jimmy Hart goes, ‘Come on, baby. We got to do something down in the studio,’ and he grabbed me out because we did have to do some kind of filming down there. But if not, man, I was gonna choke Eric out. I swear I’m so pissed off because Fit was my friend, and now he’s lying, and he had a dead foot for a while.”
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