Necro Butcher

Dylan Keith Summers was born on July 13, 1973, in Pine Grove, West Virginia. He trained under Black Bart, the former NWA Texas mainstay, and Jay Diego, and had his first match on January 2, 1998. The early years were spent on small Texas independent shows under a string of forgettable names before he settled on Necro Butcher — a character that was less a gimmick than a description.

The look never changed. No boots, no tights, no entrance gear: a pair of jeans, bare feet, long hair and a beard. At six foot two and around 230 pounds he was bigger than most of the men working the deathmatch style, and he moved like a bar fighter rather than a wrestler — punches, headbutts, chair shots, sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the ring and daring an opponent to hit him with another one. Wrestling Observer Newsletter readers voted him Best Brawler in 2008 and 2009, and it was the right category.

Ian Rotten's IWA Mid-South, in southern Indiana, was where the character found its audience. Summers worked there from 2001 to 2008. In 2002 he won the King of the Deathmatch tournament, going through Mark Wolf, Mitch Page, 2 Tuff Tony and Spyder Nate Webb across one weekend of stipulation matches. On September 9, 2007, he won the IWA Mid-South Deathmatch Championship.

His most infamous IWA-MS match was against Mad Man Pondo at the company's No Blood, No Guts, No Glory event — a 200 Light Tubes deathmatch that left both men with deep cuts from the glass and the mercury-laden dust inside the tubes. It was the kind of match the company's reputation was built on, and the kind that critics of the style point to. Pondo was as often his partner as his opponent; the two won the Juggalo Championship Wrestling tag titles together twice during Summers' 2003–2013 run with that company.

The first — and for years the only — wrestler to win both King of the Deathmatch and CZW's Tournament of Death.

Combat Zone Wrestling in Philadelphia was the other pole of American deathmatch wrestling, and Summers worked there from 2002 to 2012. CZW's answer to King of the Deathmatch was the Tournament of Death, an outdoor summer bracket of glass, barbed wire and weed-whackers. Summers won Tournament of Death IV, which made him the first man to hold both of the style's major tournament wins. For a deathmatch wrestler that is the equivalent of a grand slam, and nobody else had done it.

Ring of Honor booked Summers from 2006 to 2010, and the casting was deliberate. ROH sold itself on clean, athletic wrestling; dropping a barefoot deathmatch brawler into that environment was a story on its own. His feud with Samoa Joe, and later matches against Low Ki, were built as collisions between two ideas of what a fight should be, and they went into the crowd, up the aisle and through the merchandise tables more often than the ROH production truck was used to.

In 2007 he joined The Age of the Fall, the stable led by Jimmy Jacobs with Tyler Black and Lacey, which gave him a run in ROH's main storyline rather than the sideshow slot. In 2010 he landed at number 190 in the Pro Wrestling Illustrated 500 — a modest ranking, but a national magazine listing for a man whose whole career had been built on shows that national magazines did not cover.

The widest audience Summers ever had came from a film. Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) cast Mickey Rourke as a broken-down veteran working the independents, and the movie's hardcore match — staples, glass, a fork — was worked opposite Necro Butcher, playing a version of himself. For a great many people who have never bought an indie ticket, that scene is the only deathmatch they have seen, and he is the man in it.

He wrestled what was billed as his retirement match on June 11, 2016, in Sayreville, New Jersey. Like most wrestling retirements, it held for a while: he came back in December 2018 for Game Changer Wrestling's Joey Janela's Spring Break 3. On July 1, 2020, he announced he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma; on February 2, 2021, he announced he was clear of it. A father of six, he lives with the accumulated damage of twenty years of glass and folding chairs, and the record shows he never once pretended the style was anything other than what it was.