Hey, This Happened: Bull Pain Riles Up a Women's Prison

Bull Pain vs. SoulTaker, KAW 1999


ER: When attending live professional wrestling, there is a hierarchy of "the best fans" that you hope to be stationed around. The type of fans who provide you with genuine excitement, laughs, sheer joy, just by being seated around them. The hierarchy tends to go a) children b) developmentally disabled c) old people d) black people. They are all the best fans and it would be impossible for me to accurately rank them. And it is important to note that in NO WAY are these rankings holier than thou, judgmental, condescending rankings. There is no laughing at any of these people. Those four groups are merely people who know how to have a fucking blast at live professional wrestling, and their joy and attitudes are infectious. I never got to witness live pro wrestling as a child, but witnessing a child witnessing pro wrestling is pure magic. Old people bring in experience, and a certain jaded outlook on life in general, but also a little bit of it is still real to them. When I watched a Chainsaw Charlie match with my grandfather, he thought it was simultaneously idiotic...but also thought he was kind of not fake. His favorite wrestler was Freddy Blassie. He once called my mother's school principal a pencil-neck geek. But all four of those categories of fans are the best, and if you can find yourself somehow surrounded by all of those very different and yet very magical and also widely paintbrushed-by-me groups of people, your live wrestling experience will be a guaranteed success. In fact I'd be interested in polling actual pro wrestlers and seeing what their specific favorite crowd member type is. I wouldn't be shocked if it lined up with the 4 buckets I presented.


And yet, until a few weeks ago, I didn't realize there was a 5th bucket that I had never even considered a possibility: Convicted Felons. And in this specific case, Female Convicted Felons. It was like when Ben & Jerry's came out with that ice cream that had chocolate covered potato chips. It was something I never considered, but exactly what I wanted.


Bull Pain, one of my absolute favorite wrestlers, playing his craft in front of hundreds of female Tennessee lawbreakers. And it's amazing. It's everything that you wanted, even though you never knew you wanted it. Pain comes out to AC/DC and the women are into it, until he starts crotch chopping them and then they immediately turn. SoulTaker may as well have been a body pillow because the women do not care about him. I personally have no clue who SoulTaker is. It's definitely not Charles Wright. Whoever it was, was not very good. Although, I suppose he was good at sitting back and letting Pain do his thing. And that thing is yell at a bunch of incarcerated women who all want to yell back at him. Pain takes every opportunity to roll out of the ring, engage the ladies, flip them off, call his shot and single out three separate women before delivering a DDT SoulTaker does take a nice DDT on the floor, so there's that); Pain at one point pulls out the dreaded double middle finger, with his hands reaching allllll the way back underneath the deepest parts of his buttocks to deliver the double middles. At another point he sits on an unsuspecting woman and rubs his buns all over her. The women were all great. They were the perfect level of "just playing along" combined with "some of them could take some of this very seriously". And Pain loved it. Pain was clearly having a blast, probably even more of a blast than I was having watching it. He batters Taker with a chair - which seems like a dangerously slippery slope, as these women were all sitting in chairs, and once a guy flipping them off reminds them that these things make handy blunt beating instruments, it very easily could have set it off. Pain delivers a nasty rope drape DDT for the win, but really this could have gone for ages. Imagine all the amazing hide the weapon games you could play with crowd plants. Pain passes off a fake weapon to a woman, guard pats her down and finds an actual toothbrush shiv, woman is violently removed from the match. Imagine a stooging heel working the crowd, coming out with layered magazine body armor taped to their body. This was a concept that easily could have lent itself to incredible weekly television. That we're never going to get any more is a shame. That we got 10 minutes of it at all is a true wrestling gift.