Court Bauer Pitched Vince McMahon On An Exploding Ring Match, Got The Punjabi Prison Instead

The Punjabi Prison has become one of the most famous matches in WWE history, for better or worse.

Introduced in 2006, The Undertaker and Big Show were the first two men to battle inside the Punjabi Prison, though The Great Khali was originally scheduled for the match as it was his “specialty.” The Punjabi Prison features two bamboo cages where the competitors try to escape to win.

That was not the original idea for the bout.

“I was at WWE, when we did the infamous Punjabi Prison Match, as you might remember,” Bauer explained during a recent episode of GameSpot’s wrestling podcast Wrestle Buddies. “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. 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. 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.”

There was been three Punjabi Prison matches in history with the most recent coming in 2017 when Jinder Mahal battled Randy Orton.

It is unknown if the Punjabi Prison will see the light of day again.