Guest Author - Vance R. Rowe
Kids, Don’t Try This At Home
(This is part one of a two part article. The second and final part will be available next week)
One…Two…Thr...No!! Wrestler A kicked out of another pin attempt and Wrestler B was getting frustrated that he couldn’t pin his opponent so he decided to try something else. He rolled out of the ring, grabbed a steel folding chair and climbed back in.
As Wrestler A slowly got to his feet, Wrestler B swung the steel chair like a baseball bat and clobbered Wrestler A right across his head and it landed with a sickening thud. Wrestler A collapsed to the mat in a quivering heap and Wrestler B tossed the chair out of the ring and covered Wrestler A for the three count pin and the victory.
Wrestler B happily went back to the locker rooms and Wrestler A had to be carried out on a stretcher. Wrestler B went on to enjoy a lucrative career in professional wrestling and Wrestler A is sitting at home in a wheelchair sipping his food through a straw with the mental capacity of a two year old child because the chair shot went wrong.
The above story is purely fictional but is not impossible. Many wrestlers have had their careers cut short due to in ring mishaps and these are trained professionals.
Darren “Droz” Drozdov was one of those wrestlers. He was in a match against the hated D’Lo Brown and at one point in the match, D’Lo scooped Droz up in his arms and ran with him across the ring to perform a routine maneuver called the “running powerslam”.
However, a fan tossed a drink into the ring and the drink covered a section of the ring and when D’Lo stepped on it, he slipped and dropped Droz on his head. The result was Droz breaking a couple of disks in his neck and becoming paralyzed from the waist down.
Owen Hart was tragically killed when he was being lowered from the ceiling of the arena during the 1999 “Over The Edge” Pay-Per-View, when something went wrong and he suddenly free fell about sixty feet and hit his head on the ring apron and died instantly.
Joey Mercury, of the WWE’s tag team, MNM, received a broken nose during a ladder match involving his then partner, Johnny Nitro, the Hardy Boyz and William Regal and his partner, Dave Taylor. Mercury was leaning over a ladder that was lying against the ring ropes. Matt Hardy leaped off of a turn buckle and onto an end of the ladder. The other end of the ladder came up and nailed Mercury in the face, thereby breaking his nose. He was immediately rushed to the hospital where he received five stitches to the inside of his nose and fifteen stitches on the outside of his nose.
End of Part One
