Kevin Nash says there is only one way to work a cage match, and that the moment someone goes to the top rope in one, the whole thing stops making sense.
Asked in the Ask Nash segment on Kliq This for his favorite, he picked a mid-90s WWF match immediately.
“My favorite was with Bret, when Taker came through the bottom, which set up ours,” Nash said. “That was some good mid-90s wrestling right there.”
He said he liked working them generally, because the structure of a cage match forces a single idea.
“There’s only one way to have a cage match. You watch Hansen and Brody, which is a great one, because you just take two big guys and they fight back and forth and they block,” Nash said. “The sooner you can, because you can’t pin anybody, the psychology has to be, I’m going to use this cage as a weapon. I’m going to pulverise them into this cage, because it’s the only intangible that’s not involved in any other match.”
His test for whether a spot belongs is whether it would happen in a real fight.
“You’ve got the same rope, same turnbuckle, but you have now this steel apparatus. And if it was a shoot, that’s exactly what you would do,” he said. “You sure as hell wouldn’t do high spots and go off the top rope. If you can jump off and drop an elbow, you can take another three hops and be over the top.”
Asked whether he had ever been in a bad one, Nash said he does not think a bad one is possible.
“I don’t think you can have a bad one, because everybody goes into the cage,” he said. “Pretty soon it just looks like a bomb went off, and people are just kind of dragging themselves around like a bomb went off in a war movie.”
The match he named is the one people still bring up from that period. Diesel defended the WWF Championship against Bret Hart in a steel cage at In Your House 6 in February 1996, and the finish came when The Undertaker came up through the ring and dragged Diesel under it, letting Hart climb out and win the title. That set up Undertaker against Diesel at WrestleMania 12, which is the ours Nash is referring to.
The Hansen and Brody reference is to the pair’s cage matches in Japan across the 1980s, which were built on exactly the structure Nash is describing, two heavyweights using the steel rather than working around it.
There is a practical reason behind the rule he is describing as well. A cage match has no count-out and no disqualification, which strips out most of the tools a wrestler uses to structure a match, and escape is the only win condition on offer alongside a pinfall. Nash’s argument is that this leaves one coherent story, which is two people trying to get out and using the only new object in the match to stop each other.
The argument has a target even if Nash did not name one. Cage matches on modern television routinely feature dives off the top of the structure, and the spot Nash is objecting to has become the thing those matches are built towards rather than an exception in them. His position is that the moment a wrestler climbs to escape and then jumps back in, the only rule the match has stops applying.
Nash worked cage matches through the Diesel run and into WCW, and has held the WWF Championship, the WCW World Heavyweight Championship and the WWF Tag Team Championship with Scott Hall as The Outsiders. He is in the WWE Hall of Fame twice, once on his own and once with the nWo.
