Penne Pasta Used as Weapon at New Jersey Pro Wrestling Show

A wrestler named Crowbar used penne pasta as a foreign object at a pro wrestling show in New Jersey, and the clip has been making the rounds online for all the right reasons.

Crowbar, the ring name of Rutherford native Christopher "Chris" Ford, built his reputation through a decade of hardcore matches in World Championship Wrestling and beyond, where his calling card was exactly what the name suggests: an actual crowbar. So when Ford turned to a bag of uncooked penne as his weapon of choice at a recent Garden State indie show, nobody in the audience, and nobody watching the resulting viral video, quite knew whether to wince or applaud. They did both, apparently, and then shared the clip.

The footage, circulated widely by wrestling media outlet Cultaholic with the caption "Just Crowbar using penne pasta as a weapon. Pro wrestling continues to be great," captures the absurdist spirit of indie wrestling at its most inventive. Penne may be harmless by any reasonable culinary or legal standard, but in the hands of a 51-year-old ECW-era brawler with a crowbar gimmick, it lands with the full weight of kayfabe comedy.

This is what makes the bit work beyond the obvious pasta pun. Ford spent years in the late 1990s and early 2000s training under the hardcore ethos of his idol Terry Funk, taking bumps off elevated structures and introducing steel into matches without a second thought. Penne pasta, then, is not just a prop. It is the punchline of a decades-long character arc. The joke only lands if you know the setup, and wrestling fans absolutely know the setup.

Foreign objects are a staple of pro wrestling storytelling, used by heels and gimmick-match regulars to bend rules and generate heat from the crowd. The best deployments have always mixed menace with absurdity: a candy cane, a fish, a potted plant. Penne joins a distinguished lineage of ridiculous ring props, with the added distinction of being, as one observer noted online, "a really hardcore weapon to use in pro wrestling."

New Jersey's indie scene has long punched above its weight in producing moments like this. The state that gave the wrestling world ECW's bingo hall intensity and decades of regional promotions grinding out shows in rec centers and VFW halls has always had a taste for the theatrical and the slightly unhinged. A Rutherford-born WCW veteran turning penne rigate into a finishing argument fits the tradition perfectly.

Ford is still active on the independent circuit, and for anyone who wants to catch a live show where the weaponry could theoretically include dry pasta, New Jersey promotions including the Independent Superstars of Pro Wrestling and East Coast Professional Wrestling run regular shows across the state. Tickets typically run between ten and twenty-five dollars at the door. Bringing your own rigatoni is, as yet, unconfirmed as a prohibited item.