It’s a rarity when wrestling matches go over an hour now but it used to happen more often. Chris Hero still recalls working a two out of three falls match with CM Punk that went 92 minutes.
Chris Hero was a guest on POST Wrestling to discuss a wide variety of subjects. Asked about his 92-minute match with CM Punk for IWA Mid South, Hero admits they weren’t planning to go the full 90 minutes.
“I ended up having some other matches that were 40, 50 minutes. The tables and ladders match that Punk and I had in February ’02, that was the one that we’re leaving the buildings were like, ‘Oh, let’s destroy the building.'” Chris Hero recalled. “We didn’t mean for that match to go long but that match ended up being 45 minutes plus. Then that created a thing later that year he and I had an hour draw, and then around the anniversary of that tables and ladders match.
“We had the two out of three falls with a 90-minute time limit, which I remember reading about something at the time,” Hero explained. “I thought there was a match between [Yuji] Nagata and Osamu Nishimura that [had] a 90-minute time limit as a gimmick. That’s how it is in my brain; that’s probably not exactly what happened. And I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s a cool gimmick.’ Like you have a 90-minute time limit.
“You’re not going to go 90 minutes but just [having] the time limit is interesting. Until that day, we were not going to go 90 minutes. We both got there and we’re like, ‘Hey, let’s do 90,'” he said. “So we ended with a double pin on one of them, so we had to go to overtime. We did 92 minutes on a match that may not have ever existed, like that match never happened. I don’t know. My brain may have just created something in 2003; who knows? I don’t know how it happened.”
Watch the full match between CM Punk and Chris Hero below:
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What do you make of Chris Hero’s comments? Do you think wrestling fans would accept a 92-minute match in 2023? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
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