Remembering the most brutal moments WWE has still managed since going PG in 2008

[Jamie]

a fresh rundown of the most genuinely brutal moments WWE has produced since July 22, 2008, the date the company officially decreed all its programming would adhere to a PG rating after years of pressure from sponsors and special interest groups. Gone were the days of blood, cursing, and swimsuit contests, as the piece puts it, yet WWE somehow remained a family friendly business that still promoted fights where people punch each other in the head, and the list rounds up the handful of moments that genuinely flouted the PG rules with reckless abandon over the years since.

One entry covers NXT's 2018 trilogy between Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa, which produced three increasingly wild matches across that single year. Their unsanctioned brawl at TakeOver New Orleans saw Gargano powerbomb his former partner directly onto the exposed concrete floor, before the pair reconvened two months later at TakeOver Chicago II for a Chicago Street Fight that ended with Gargano taking a DDT onto the ring's bare wooden boards while Ciampa was still handcuffed. Their rivalry finally wrapped up at TakeOver Brooklyn 4 in a Last Man Standing match that, while it ran a bit too long and got silly in places, still produced its fair share of brutal moments.

Other entries pulled from around the wider web covering this same general topic point to Chris Jericho getting suplexed onto a bed of thumbtacks inside the Ambrose Asylum steel cage match against Dean Ambrose, Shane McMahon's infamous leap off the top of Hell in a Cell attempting to hit The Undertaker with a Coast to Coast style dive, and Randy Orton getting legitimately busted open by a string of vicious, almost MMA style punches and elbows from Brock Lesnar during their SummerSlam 2016 main event.

What all these moments share is that they would be considered fairly tame by the standards of the old Attitude Era, when blood, weapons, and genuinely dangerous stunts were essentially the weekly norm rather than the rare exception. In a sanitized PG world though, each of these specific moments still managed to blow people's minds precisely because they stood out so sharply against everything else surrounding them on the rest of the card

8 Most Brutal Hardcore Moments Of WWE's PG Erawhatculture.com