The Most Awful Backyard Wrestling Fails

Have you ever wondered why episodes of WWE Raw start with a disclaimer about how the sweaty men in the ring are trained professionals? It's because of backyard wrestling. Kids all over the country, in imitation of their idols, body-slam each other in barns, sheds and the middle of nowhere, and sometimes they videotape it. Those videos make their way to YouTube, and here we have the most awful backyard wrestling fails.

Gorilla Suit Flop

One of the most common backyard wrestling "moves" is throwing your body off of a high place onto your opponent. Unfortunately, wearing a gorilla suit kind of screws with your depth perception, as the idiot in this video discovers. When he tries to flip off of a roof onto a helpless victim on a table below, he drastically overshoots the mark, hitting the side of the table with a sickening crash and popping his mask right off of his face.

Ropes To The Face

Professional wrestling ring ropes are usually made of thick plastic-wrapped cable to give them a perfect mixture of stability and springiness without hurting the performers. The "ring" put together by these guys looks more like a bunch of extension cords tied together, or the remnants of a chicken-wire fence. So when the guy in the red shirt tries to get fancy and jump onto it to rebound on his opponent, it doesn't work exactly as planned.

Ladder Flip

This is probably the least painful fail on this list, but it's so funny we needed to put it in. The basic move doesn't look too painful - how much damage could getting slammed on a cardboard box really do - but the follow-through is where the fun begins. Somehow the ladder gets snagged on the victim and flips through the air after he does, landing with a thwack right on his prone face. Somebody give that ladder a medal.

Head Ache

Pro wrestlers go to school to learn how to deliver the painful-looking moves they do in the ring. It takes a ton of strength and agility to be able to simulate causing pain to an opponent. These two guys attempt a move known as the Styles Clash in their backyard ring, only to turn the recipient into a drooling vegetable. Thankfully, they added a slow-motion replay so you can see exactly how disgusting the injury to the poor chump's neck truly is.

Roof Slam

There's literally no way that the move these two dummies were going for could have ever worked out. It seems like the general plan was to jump off the roof and put the guy in the black shirt through a table. Unfortunately, the guy in the orange shirt who should have been in control of the situation kind of wasn't, hitting the table with his feet and landing hard on his tailbone. Both chumps were left screaming in agony on the lawn where they belong.

Trampoline Ladder Disaster

Backyard wrestlers often use a trampoline as a springy, non-lethal surface to practice their fake fighting moves on. This is generally a good idea until some genius brings a ladder into the mix. These two oafs set up a spot where the guy in the red shirt is supposed to take a superplex onto the bouncy trampoline, only to see the ladder collapse and send both of them hitting the significantly less bouncy part of the trampoline with their faces.

Missed Jump

This video is only three seconds long and yet it's still brutal enough to earn a spot on this list. Shot in gloriously grainy VHS, it stars a chubby kid who goes up onto a ladder to nail a frog splash. Unfortunately, his push-off ends up knocking the ladder over, causing his flight to end in a hideous crash landing right on his neck. We don't know what happened to the poor schmuck afterwards, but we can bet it involved the phrase "a lifetime of pain."

Ring Flop

One of the most upsetting things about these backyard wrestling groups is just how ramshackle their rings are. The squared circle the two suckers in this video are using looks like it was put together by a second grade art class, and the ropes are so loose it's hilarious. That's why it's not surprising that when the skinny wrestler goes up to the top rope to perform some kind of high-risk move it wobbles out from underneath him and sends him on a one-way trip to paralysis land.

Fire Table

Even something as stupidly dangerous as backyard wrestling can get even more dangerous when you add fire to the equation. All suspension of disbelief is thrown out the window as two bros squirt lighter fluid all over a stolen traffic sign and slam a third guy into it, only for him to come to the unsurprising revelation that fire can burn you and cause you intense pain. Even better, the blowback from the explosion seems to have injured the cameraman as well.