A clash between two combat sports legends at a recent event turned into such a mess that popular wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer considered it the worst match he’s ever seen in his long history of covering the industry.
At the 2025 Mark Hitchcock Memorial SuperShow during WrestleCon, Minoru Suzuki faced boxing great Butterbean in a match that Meltzer has called “the worst pro wrestling match I’ve ever seen”. In a recent edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter review, Meltzer gave the match a sarcastic –459.7 star rating. Anod to absolute zero on the Fahrenheit scale (or –273.15 Celsius).
”Worse than the Sheik & Volkoff match on Heroes of Wrestling. This was the worst pro wrestling match I’ve ever seen,” Meltzer claimed. “The crowd was so sympathetic to Butterbean that they made a lot of noise. Chanted ‘Fight Forever,’ and after the double count-out chanted ‘one more round.’”
Despite the crowd chanting “Fight Forever” and “One more round” out of pity, the action was not even close to meeting expectations. The match ended in a double count-out in the second round, which only added to the crowd’s frustration.
“I figured they were going to give the crowd one more round,” Meltzer wrote. “Then the ring announcer again said it was a double count-out. I have no idea why you’d announce that a second time, and the second time, people booed louder because they actually wanted it to continue.”
“This was so awful it was perversely entertaining,” he concluded. “Unlike the prior match, which just seemed like the crowd was stunned watching how bad it was.”
According to Meltzer, Suzuki was furious backstage after the match and frustrated that he was not able to salvage it. “The reality is none of this was Suzuki’s fault. Butterbean had no business in the ring.”
“The thing is, people were really into the idea of the match and thought it was awesome when it was announced, and nobody had any hopes for it to be a good match. But I can’t imagine anyone expected anything this bad.”
Heading into the match, Butterbean had been wheelchair bound. But he was recently able to regain some ability to walk again with the help of WWE Hall of Famer Diamond Dallas Page. However, he was nowhere close to being in the condition for a match, and the announcing team tried to cover him with claims that he had recently recovered from a broken leg.
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