Last Days of Necro

Necro Butcher didn't work a ton of matches during his last few active years, and I realized I'd hardly seen any of his work from 2014-16. It surely couldn't hurt to take a look at some of those matches, just to see the last glimpses of this legend.

Necro Butcher vs. Brute VanSlyke 2CW 12/27/14

ER: This was No Holds Barred and we had no idea how literally that would be taken during this match. I'd never seen VanSlyke before but he's a big guy who clearly has no problems taking balled up punches to the face, and will happily hurt this old boxcar hobo. This was a really good brawl that focused on two guys hitting the other. That seems pretty obvious, but so many of these things are about stupid spot set up with too much space between the beatings. This was constant beatings. Necro clonked Brute with ring steps and a chair, and even grabbed him right by the balls and yanked. Brute slammed him into the ringpost and worked a convincing backbreaker (nice sell by Necro too) and continued working that back by slamming him into the turnbuckles. Necro doesn't really bump at this point - can't blame him - and he doesn't look physically able to get up for a ton anymore. There were a few times where Brute lifted him into something and looked like he was doing 100% of the work. BUT, that also made it look more impressive. Brute dishing a tough suplex on a big guy like Necro with none of Necro's help is only going to make this guy look cool. The finish was a fantastic fireworks show, with this breaking down into a big punch exchange, building to Brute hitting a nasty lariat on Necro. And then he makes this better and better by picking Necro up for a few more short arm lariats, grabbing him off the mat by his beard on the last one, and aiming that lariat right at the side of Necro's head. If there's a better Necro brawl than this one in the last couple years of his career, someone please show it to me now!

Necro Butcher/Smokey C/Grim Reefer vs. Sabu/Rhino/Devon Moore PWS 6/11/16

ER: Well this was kind of a drag. This is noteworthy for being Necro Butcher's last wrestling match (yes he was in the goofy Janela battle royal earlier this year, but this was at least supposedly structured like a match), but it isn't really much outside of that fact. Necro is involved in this footage less than maybe anyone (I'm sure he was off brawling in the crowd, but this handheld didn't pick a second of that up). This was mostly Sabu throwing chairs at people and then doing his legdrop/chair thing and people chanting "You still got it!" This felt much more like Sabu's retirement match than Necro Butcher's. Grim Reefer had a couple nice moments including a cool rope walk somersault senton, but that was about it. Just as it looked like Necro was going to go through a highlight reel of Necro Butcher stuff, Natural Born Killaz hit and we got a New Jack appearance. Jack is moving slow as hellllll and we got a guitar shot, some cane shots, and at one point he put a trash can on Necro and just sort of fell on him. Necro at least made some things interesting with his selling, making it look like he took something sharp to his eye. That's something. But Necro clearly needed to retire. Nothing about him at this point really read "wrestler". He was wearing track pants and looked about as old as someone can look at 43. A lot of the match honestly felt like a way to tease Necro *about* to do something, but not being able to. He fired back a bit with some floating punches on New Jack, and wasn't even allowed to hit the tiger driver. Who wanted this to end with Necro losing to Devon Moore by small package? This felt like it was designed to be a crowd pleasing match, that wasn't really pleasing in any way to me. Necro is an absolute pillar to me, hate to see this be the last gasp, but also glad the dude eventually got out of wrestling.