WWE’s Punjabi Prison Match stipulation has gone down as one of the worst in company history. The bout was originally introduced in the mid-2000s as the signature match for The Great Khali, featuring two steel-reinforced bamboo cages with doors that could be temporarily opened by referees and weapons that can be freely used as each wrestler tries to escape both cages. There have only ever been three matches with the stipulation — The Undertaker vs. Big Show at Great American Bash 2006, Batista vs. The Great Khali at No Mercy 2007 and Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal at Battleground 2017 — all of which were panned by fans and critics alike.
But the match type was originally envisioned to look nothing like what eventually made its way to WWE programming. Court Baurer, the CEO of Major League Wrestling (MLW), was on WWE’s creative team back in the mid-2000s and pitched an idea for what was supposed to be Undertaker vs. Khali at the Great American Bash in ’06.
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“Now, full disclaimer, I had pitched Vince [McMahon] on that match, but it wasn’t that match. It was — I’m not going to bury myself. Actually, I showed him a tape of an [Atsushi] Onita deathmatch with the exploding ring,” Bauer told GameSpot’s Wrestle Buddies podcast this week. “I said I wanted to do that in WWE, and he signed off on it–members of the creative team have gone on record backing the story. And it goes to Kevin Dunn, who we didn’t hear from for a while, everything was close to the vest. But hey, if Vince says it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen.
“We start seeing the mockups for what the exploding cage was going to look like,” he added. “First of all, there was no explosions. This was about 10 days before the PPV. And the second thing we learned was it’s bamboo. And it’s almost like an Indiana Jones playset from Temple of Doom. And you’re like, ‘This is so perversely not what we talked about. Oh my god. This is going to bury the creative team once again.’ Of course, we took the heat for that one. But it’s interesting how you take risks, and sometimes, in different systems, it either turbo-charges the idea, or it mutates into a Punjabi Prison match.”
