By Coach B

There are three levels of Hell in a Cell. Same steel. Different jobs.

The Undertaker and Mankind should not be ranked against other Hell in a Cell matches. That is the match people show other people when they say, “Oh, you don’t believe professional wrestling? Well, check this shit out.”

It exists on its own. There you go.

Then there is The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels at Badd Blood in 1997. One of the greatest matches of all time, and its own category. Not necessarily a great steel cage match. A great match that happened inside a cage.

Blood. Shawn Michaels bumping around like a man being hunted for sport. Kane ripping the door off. Fabulous.

Different wing of the museum.

For my money, the greatest actual steel cage match may have also been a Hell in a Cell match. It happened somewhat recently, and solely for my own selfish purposes, with literally nobody on the planet requesting it, I am going to watch CM Punk and Drew McIntyre at Bad Blood 2024.

Because I want to.

Mostly, though, this is about Drew.

I was not a Drew guy at first. Truthfully, part of the problem was that stupid-ass sword he used to lug to the ring.

It feels counterintuitive to call a sword dumb because swords are objectively badass. The problem was the limited menu. He could butt somebody with the handle. He could hit somebody kind of crossbar-wise. But God as my witness, everyone knew Drew was never going to stab a motherfucker.

Not one time.

Was he going to cut somebody from stem to sternum? Absolutely freaking not. It was a sword whose primary purpose was to remind us that Drew McIntyre was Scottish, which we had already gathered from Drew McIntyre.

This was also the company that asked us, during the pandemic, to believe Seth Rollins removed Rey Mysterio’s eyeball.

Eye extraction: plausible.

The sword: still décor.

There is the old WWF Superstars episode where the Berserker came within inches of stabbing The Undertaker with an actual sword. Required viewing. That one still looks like it might happen.

The William Wallace math should have worked. Drew is Scottish. Wallace was a historical badass. Swords remain objectively badass.

The sword was never really the problem.

The problem was that we did not know Drew.

I did not become a Drew McIntyre fan until the pandemic hit and he was asked to carry the ball behind a shit offensive line of circumstances. He beat Brock Lesnar for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania in a building containing almost nobody.

No stadium. No eruption. No tens of thousands of people finally answering the moment WWE had spent years trying to create.

Drew still had to make the best of it. He had to become the conquering new champion while nearly every condition required to make that accomplishment feel enormous had disappeared.

Once Vince McMahon was finally set aside, we began to hear something closer to the real Drew. This remains strange because Vince always seemed to be a Drew guy.

Chosen One. Brought him back. Made him champion.

Vince believed in Drew McIntyre.

Maybe he believed more in the idea of Drew McIntyre.

It took Triple H, he of the slightly less ridiculous sledgehammer fame, to let Drew talk like Drew. Come to find out, the giant Scottish guy was dry, sarcastic, biting, aggrieved, and funny as hell. He had already received the “best of luck in your future endeavors” treatment, rebuilt himself elsewhere, and returned as the person Vince had predicted years earlier.

Only now he could tell us how he felt about all of it.

Fortunately for Drew, and for the rest of us, CM Punk came back.

In this WWE Superstar milquetoast era, it was nice to have Phil “I Don’t Give a Single Fuck” Brooks back in our lives.

When Hell in a Cell became an annual event, it lost the grudge-match part. The Cell stopped being where a feud had to go and became something scheduled because it happened to be October.

Jim Cornette has long said he pitched the structure: Memphis cage around the ringside area, WarGames roof on top. Lock everybody in. Keep everybody else out.

Not red furniture for a themed show.

The place where a problem ended.

Great grudge matches are supposed to change the people involved.

Roddy Piper permanently lost much of the hearing in his left ear in the dog-collar match with Greg Valentine. Mick Foley had his ear torn off after getting trapped in the ropes with Vader in Germany. Most fans never saw it. Foley wrote it so vividly that it became indelible anyway.

Then Robbie Lawler and Rory MacDonald at UFC 189. Real fighting, same horrible understanding. Two people go through something and come out different. There are fights after which nobody returns to the person they were before the bell.

This is professional wrestling. We know what it is.

A match like this is trying to make us forget that.

I have watched Punk and Drew inside Hell in a Cell probably a dozen times. This time the word was not hatred, although a reasonable facsimile was present.

The word was love.

Not brotherly love. Not Dude Love. Let’s be clear.

Love of professional wrestling. Not sports entertainment.

That is an easy sentence to slap on any good match, which is how it becomes a T-shirt. Wrestlers love wrestling. Wonderful.

But whatever hatred existed between Drew and Punk, real or imagined, they shared enough love of the thing to make the hatred feel real. They understood what the match was supposed to be. They understood what the Cell had stopped being. Then they spent thirty minutes trying to give it back its meaning.

That is why this is the greatest Hell in a Cell match of the modern era.

Modern era: twenty-five years. It is 2026. Everything from 2001 forward.

Is it also the greatest steel cage match of that period?

That is the question.

No hatred for Michael Cole. Corey Graves is fantastic, and not just here. For my money, unmatched in modern commentary.

Pat McAfee has apparently promised never to return to WWE television. Keep that promise. I do not enjoy being yelled at all the fucking time.

Graves and Cole set the scene, then get out of the way. The Triple H-era camera work is out-fucking-standing. Close enough for the small stuff without turning the match into a performance for the lens.

I usually hate talking in matches. Roman will halt three moves for whatever monologue he had planned until the match is waiting on him to finish speaking.

This is different.

The camera catches Drew telling Punk he is going to end his career. Then the deeper cut: his wife is going to leave him.

I love when somebody’s actual life gets dragged into this shit. That is when it feels like they went somewhere they were not supposed to go. Championships fall away. It becomes personal.

Jerry Jarrett school, as I understand it: tell people a bunch of things that are true. Then mix in things that are not true but sit close enough that nobody is certain where one ends.

Maybe none of the rest of this shit is real.

That shit sounded real.

The injuries are real. The histories are real. The things Punk cost Drew are part of the story, and Drew’s resentment does not feel invented. Then he talks about Punk’s wife leaving him, and the line bleeds.

Nothing is in a rush.

There is plenty of selling, as there should be when people are bleeding and putting wrenches in open wounds. Nobody eats a wrench, rolls over, and starts the next scheduled sequence.

Things hurt. They are allowed to hurt.

Punk makes a production of the weapons. He does not empty the underside of the ring like a storage unit. Each one comes out so the crowd can see it, understand it, and dread it.

The table work is better than “somebody will fall through this later.” They tear the legs off and turn furniture into a problem. The legs become clubs, braces, ugly little spears. The table stops being a table and becomes a kit of increasingly bad ideas.

Then Punk drop-toeholds Drew throat-first onto the exposed edge.

Holy shit.

Drew gets his hands up at the last possible instant, just enough that the edge does not take his whole throat. Even knowing he gets through it, the rewatch still does it.

Wow.

Drew throwing Punk face-first into the Cell like a lawn dart is a more common spot. It still looks like it had to suck.

Halfway through, Drew looks pretty good. A little of Punk’s blood on his hand. Punk is bleeding like Boom Boom Mancini. The stuck-pig description is reserved for later.

“This is awesome” chants are usually free paper crowns at Burger King. This one is reasonably justified.

The strange part is how much match is left. The crowd already believes. Most of what the match will be remembered for has not happened.

Under the blood, they are still building a classic wrestling match. Finishers are set up without becoming a loop. Drew starts the three-two-one Claymore countdown. Punk rolls out, and that escape becomes the toolbox. Later Punk hits the Go to Sleep, but Drew falls outside at the last second.

Nobody stands there stunned that a finisher got two. The other man sees it coming and leaves. Then leaving becomes the next chapter.

Street fight. Grudge match. Bloody cage match.

Also two guys who are extremely good at professional wrestling.

Punk remains an obvious Bret Hart guy. Bulldog, double axe handle, sure. Mostly the pacing. Nothing happens only because it is time for the next move. Everything changes what the other man can do.

Then the toolbox.

The toolbox shot was planned. Both men knew. WWE: Unreal later confirmed it, which is exactly why I dislike WWE: Unreal.

A company-made peek behind the curtain still shows only what the company wants shown. Enough mystery dies. Enough stays hidden. The wink inside the wink. Everybody becomes so impressed with knowing how the trick works that eventually nobody remembers why the trick was worth watching.

Anyway.

Thank God it was a toolbox. Something that might actually belong under a ring. Not a trash can. Not a kendo stick. Not a gift-wrapped bundle of light tubes.

There are wrenches inside it, and they use them. Nobody pulls a screwdriver. Orton and Hardy already handled that nightmare.

On the rewatch, Punk nudges the toolbox out, takes it with him as Drew comes around, and waits.

He puts the toolbox where he wants it.

Then he brings it down on Drew’s head. Somewhere between idea and contact, something is wrong. Corner, latch, whatever. It catches him solidly.

The sound is denser.

Not the hollow theatrical crash of a trash can. A compact thud the brain files "Umm, that didn't sound right."

Oh, fuck.

The broadcast goes to replay first. In the corner of the screen, wedged between Wendy’s and America’s largest injury law firm, we finally see Drew.

Nothing says mortal blood feud like Wendy’s beside Morgan & Morgan.

Drew is woozy, and the blood is already coming down his face.

Then Punk hits him with the fucking toolbox again.

Then he climbs to the top with the damn thing.

Three shots. Not one accident followed by a lot of color. They kept the plan after the plan went wrong.

You did not need a doctorate in Thuganomics to see that Drew’s head now required a licensed contractor.

Sixteen staples.

Here is the part the highlight packages flatten: the referee having to solve a real problem in real time.

Drew is bleeding badly enough that he cannot hear what the referee is saying. The referee is communicating with the people backstage and the doctor outside the Cell. Drew has to convince all of them that his senses are intact before somebody stops the match. No speech. No announcement. Just a third person suddenly helping conduct triage while Punk and Drew are trying to keep the whole thing moving.

The crowd changes. The mood changes.

It is real.

Blood on a random Wednesday does not do that anymore. Tables, sticks, the black bag. Blood became another available ingredient.

Blood was special here because the match had already earned the response. The sound said something went wrong. The blood agreed. For a moment, the performance crossed into damage, and the building understood it together.

Drew has said he came around on his knees, saw blood spurt about three feet across the ring “like a faucet,” and knew it had gone badly wrong. He was not only worried about his head. He was afraid they would have to stop before they finished the story they had spent nearly a year building.

That is the love.

The decision to keep going after the match became more real than intended.

They were nowhere near finished.

The spot that still makes me sickest is not the toolbox. It is Drew taking the back bump onto the edge of the steel steps.

Sometimes “this is really happening” means they pulled us under. Sometimes it means something dangerous is happening in front of us.

This was both.

No exercise that prepares the lower spine for force, momentum, and the edge of a steel step.

Maybe it will not break your back.

Maybe you will not end up in a wheelchair.

Question mark.

Drew has called it a “one-and-done” that will never be done again. Correct. My stomach still turns, even knowing he gets up.

The finish comes in rapid succession:

Black bag, which wrestling has trained us to read as thumbtacks. Beads from Punk’s bracelet instead. Drew pours them over Punk. Misses the Claymore. Lower back across the steps. Punk shoves the beads into Drew’s mouth, wraps a chain around his knee, one last Go to Sleep.

In the match, every piece means something.

The toolbox changes the physical reality. The steps punish the same Claymore countdown that ran through the match earlier. The beads belong to the feud. The chain turns the finish into an answer.

The violence has a memory.

Neither man leaves looking untouched or particularly victorious. Punk wins mostly by being conscious enough to have his hand raised. Drew leaves stapled, with a scar he may keep.

That is a grudge match.

That is what the Cell was supposed to be.

Somewhere along the way, the guy with the stupid-ass sword became one of my guys. Not because they found him a better prop. Not because somebody remembered he was Scottish.

Because Drew became dry, angry, funny, obsessive, and real enough that a cage with CM Punk felt like the only possible ending.

Greatest Hell in a Cell ever?

Depends which wing of the museum.

Greatest modern Hell in a Cell?

Yes.

Greatest modern steel cage match, for my money.

It worked because two men loved professional wrestling enough to make their hatred matter.