Sabu is most famous for being the face of Extreme Championship Wrestling, a wild showman covered in scars who personified the rebel spirit of that promotion. But his true legacy is much broader than just that lone promotion—he was an independent underground legend, an unhinged sadist who haunted armories and VFW halls, flying off chairs and putting people through tables. For years during his prime, “Best of Sabu” videotapes of ragged quality were passed from fan to fan, a secret handshake between diehards as well as a cipher to unlock an entirely new level of meaning in pro wrestling, the kind of secret knowledge that means you can never look at the sport the same way again. Sabu was the Manchester Sex Pistols show—there might have been only 75 people in the audience watching him wrestle in a Michigan high school gym, but those 75 spread the gospel and changed the wrestling world. After combing through the troves of online Sabu footage, The Ringer presents an updated version of one of those passed-around videotapes, the closest thing to a “Best of Sabu: Extreme Violence Vol. 4” redub you’d watch at 2 a.m. in your parents’ living room, right after Faces of Death. The kind of compilation that changes your life forever.
NWA Grandslam: Sabu vs. the Lightning Kid (April 17, 1993)
The Lightning Kid was a fresh-faced Sean Waltman, one week before he made his big-league debut on WWE Raw. This match was a true tape trader’s treasure, something featured on nearly every compilation tape that hardcore wrestling fans snagged from a Usenet group or Yahoo chat forum. It’s a wild sprint, with both wrestlers moving at a level of speed and danger unseen in American wrestling until that point. The fans and announcers were wholly unprepared for this—and they were doubly unprepared for the moment when Sir Oliver Humperdink tossed Lightning Kid into the post and blood started erupting out of his head. The match was a game of one-upmanship, a challenge to see what nutso dive each could unleash, every leap hovering on the verge of catastrophe. One of the great things about Sabu’s high flying was that it never looked effortless—he always seemed seconds away from crashing and burning, and Waltman brought that same high-wire act energy to the match.
Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling: Sabu and the Sheik vs. Terry Funk and Tarzan Goto (August 22, 1993)
Sabu really became the Sabu we know and love when his real-life uncle the Original Sheik first brought him to FMW in Japan. Sheik was in his 60s and needed someone to take the bumps and lose the fall if necessary. While he had originally instructed Sabu to hold back on the theatrics so that he could learn his craft, when they went to FMW, he told his nephew to cut loose and do all of the absurd things he had been practicing in his free time. This match is truly chaos—Sheik is waving around a lit torch, Funk is swinging chairs at fans, Goto is bleeding and smashing people into things, and Sabu is flying all around the ring with no regard for his own safety. This is the first time that Sabu and Funk ever faced off, and it was the start of one of the great rivalries in pro wrestling history, as the nearly 50-year-old Funk was invigorated by the balls-to-the-wall intensity that Sabu brought to every match. Funk, already a living legend, embraced that kind of chaos in the final stanza of his career. So much of pro wrestling these days is meticulously thought out and carefully planned, but here Sabu and Funk planned nothing—they just riffed, violently, and that riffing was transcendent.
National Wrestling Conference Desert Death Match: Sabu vs. Cactus Jack (October 29, 1994)
This was an anything-goes match in the Silver Nugget Pavilion, with each wrestler smashing chairs on the other’s skull and driving themselves and their opponents through tables. Every Sabu match seemingly requires the opponent to try to match his freak, and 1990s Cactus Jack was the perfect dance partner for this kind of freakfest. At one point, they brawled onto the floor of the casino, where Cactus piledrived Sabu on the blackjack table and hit a big elbow smash on the filthy casino carpet next to the sports book. The staph infection you could get from that carpet is probably nastier than anything you would have gotten from barbed wire. All told, it has the unsettling ambience of a wild pro wrestling brawl dropped into a ’70s crime film in which Philip Baker Hall would have played the referee.
AAA: Sabu, Psicosis, and Halloween vs. Damien 666, Cincinnati Red, and Rey Mysterio Jr. (October 1, 1995)
This was early on in Sabu’s run as an industry icon; he was like the high school senior in a match with a group of exciting (and excited) freshmen who clearly idolized him. The AAA guys here were clearly incredibly influenced by ECW and Sabu in particular, and you could tell that they were over the moon to have a chance to work with an idol. Sabu had a bunch of noteworthy exchanges with Rey over the decade following this match, culminating in their famous match at ECW One Night Stand in 2006. Here we see the pairing in its first stages, with two of the most exciting wrestlers ever working in concert. Psicosis tried his hardest to out-bump Sabu; he failed, but you have to appreciate the attempt. This match is a real testament to the versatility of Sabu. He wasn’t deeply immersed in the lucha world, and this was at its core a traditional lucha trios match. But Sabu worked great as a rudo in that formula while still breaking out the wild stuff that the fans expected when he was on the marquee.
Ballpark Brawl 3: Sabu vs. Teddy Hart vs. AJ Styles (August 14, 2004)
This is the pinnacle of Sabu in the indies—the hardcore lion in winter mixing it up in a tables, ladders, and chairs match with the next generation of indie wrestling stars. Hart and Styles were at the tip-top of athleticism at that point, and it is amazing to see Sabu, after a decade-plus of punishing his body, performing right up to their level. Despite his familial pedigree, Hart was a lot closer in wrestling style to Sabu than to his uncle Bret. Hart had the same disregard for his own body and the rules of society that Sabu did. Styles has always been an incredible in-ring connector, and he held the individual seams of this match together, while Sabu and Hart seemed intent on ripping them out. Sabu legendarily said that he would botch moves on purpose to increase the sense of danger for the audience and ratchet up the tension. There is a classic example of that here: He attempts an Air Sabu off a folded ladder, slips, hits the ropes hard, and smashes through a table onto the floor. Who knows whether that was the plan or not, but it was a spectacular car crash, the kind of thing we stay up late watching on borrowed VHS tapes in the hopes of seeing just once. With Sabu, you got that feeling of lightning in a bottle every single time.