8 Most Ridiculous Wrestler Injuries To Occur Outside The Ring

The most notorious of accidents involving professional wrestlers have been horrific, tragic – car accidents, plane crashes, and so forth. Wrestlers do a lot of travelling, criss-crossing the United States several times a year and stretching across half the world. We’ve covered a lot of these here and here, but we’ve rarely touched upon the more ridiculous stories regarding injuries sustained outside the ring, however.

Professional wrestling is a dangerous business, and one that, frankly, simply hurts non-stop, all day, every day. A simple back bump hurts. Being chucked out of the ring hurts. Performing top rope moves hurts, landing a flying elbow hurts… pretty much all of it, whether the moves are carried out successfully or horribly botched. It’s just not an undertaking that the human body is designed for.

That’s why it’s all the more remarkable that so many professional wrestlers have some of their worst times in ridiculous incidents outside of the ring, not inside it. Rather than cringe in sympathy, these are the incidents that cause us to wince, to cringe in sympathy, to raise an eyebrow, maybe to laugh along with them… and in at least one case, to thank our lucky stars it wasn’t us. 

In a recent admission on his podcast, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin told a story about a minor, basic, fairly uninteresting fall he’d taken in the shower. He’d slightly injured his shoulder, nothing to be concerned about.

Well, that wasn’t quite right. In point of fact, Austin (wily operator that he was) was getting out in front of a potentially embarrassing story before it might leak to the press and move out of his control.

He was filming the next season of his reality TV show, Broken Skull Challenge, and taking a shower in the bathroom of his trailer on set. While listening to a Michael Jackson song on the radio, chipper and in a funky kinda mood, the Texas Rattlesnake, toughest SOB in the WWE, decided he fancied attempting a moonwalk across the bathtub.

The moonwalk was a bad call. Austin slipped and fell in the wet bathtub, becoming wedged in the confined space, his legs tangled and his arm and shoulder pinned underneath himself. In pain and unable to move, he was forced to call his wife for help… and when he found himself genuinely stuck, had no alternative but to call the emergency services.

Austin claimed that he was assisted out of his predicament by the firefighters, who found that he’d accidentally sat on a bath scrubber that had to be removed as well… although this is likely to be a tiny exaggerated detail to spice the story up for his listeners. By telling the story his way and being able to take the mickey out of himself, Austin managed to avoid the embarrassment of some third party publication running with a front page story on how the fifty-year-old former hard man of professional wrestling fell over in the shower and couldn’t get up.