10 Legit Wrestling Injuries That Were Made Into A Storyline
Sometimes the best way to get a break is to suffer a nasty one in the ring.
Injuries are an unfortunate yet accepted part of the wrestling business. With bumps and falls being a key ingredient in any match, things will inevitably go wrong from time to time - and the results can be devastating.
Luckily, wrestling is perhaps the only sport where injury can be a blessing in disguise. A deviation from the script can be just the impetus needed for a creative change of direction - whether that change of direction is a shift in character development or an intriguing progression to an existing feud.
What's more, nothing gets the fans emotionally invested in a babyface like a road to recovery and the inevitable triumphant return. If time off is needed, it also provides the fans a chance to miss the star while they're gone, making the eagerly anticipated comeback all the more impactful.
Whether painful accidents occur on-screen or off, they are hard to avoid and companies often write them into a storyline as a means of blurring fact with fiction, while also turning a negative into a positive. Here's ten of the best examples of just that.
10. Vader Gives Cactus Jack A Concussion
In one of their many violent bouts, Cactus Jack and Vader squared off on WCW Saturday Night in April 1993. During the snug encounter, Jack missed a gruesome flip senton to the outside and crashed onto the unforgiving floor below. Unfortunately for 'Mrs Foley's Baby Boy', it was about to get a lot worse.
With Jack on the outside, Vader's manager, Harley Race, peeled back the padding to expose the concrete below. A vicious powerbomb followed, looking even more brutal than any description could allow. Unsurprisingly, the sell job by Foley was shockingly realistic... primarily due to the fact that it was real.
The impact caused a legitimate concussion and Foley was taken off TV to further sell the effects of the bump. Despite Foley's original intention of keeping the storyline serious, WCW quickly turned the angle into comic relief; within weeks, he re-emerged in the infamous 'Cactus Jack Lost in Cleveland' vignettes.
Supposedly suffering from amnesia, the notoriously bad skits involved Cactus in a variety of shockingly bad pre-taped segments. Thankfully, the vignettes were swept under the rug as soon as Foley made his return at Clash of the Champions XXIV. Instead, Vader and Cactus would square off once more in typically brutal fashion in a Texas Death Match at Halloween Havoc '93.