When Jinder Mahal became the WWE Champion in 2017, the company needed to find ways to up the stakes for his feud with Randy Orton. Given his Indian heritage, WWE brought the Punjabi Prison Match back for the first time in a decade. Mahal successfully defended his WWE Championship against Orton in the Prison at the 2017 Battleground pay-per-view in a match that even Mahal himself hated.
Advertisement"The Punjabi prison match sucks. It's terrible," he said to Chris Van Vliet on his "Insight" podcast. "It's so hard. The inside cage is the blue old-school cage. You can hit it as hard as possible and it won't even make a noise. It was terrible, and then just the crowd reaction, they couldn't really see the people in the arena. There's two cages. So when we're on the inside, there's two cages they couldn't really see. And it was just painful. Kendo sticks, chair shots, everything."
The match famously ended with the WWE return of The Great Khali, who helped Mahal retain his title by preventing Orton from escaping. Given the size of Khali, it seems like a pretty easy job to recognize the WWE Hall of Famer, leading to the company taking extreme measures to try and hide him during rehearsals.
Advertisement"They have the Punjabi Prison tarped off and all the way from the roof. Kick everybody out of the bowl, no security guard, no one's in there. But they've got to get Khali ringside to rehearse. So, they like wheeled him in on basically like a buggy between crash pads, what are you guys doing? They tried their best to hide him, but everybody saw him."
Please credit "Insight" when using quotes from this article, and give a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
