8 Most Ridiculous Wrestler Injuries To Occur Outside The Ring

On the Lake Of The Ozarks in Missouri in June 1990, professional wrestling legend and former NWA champion Harley Race and his wife were spending the day boating with friends, and agreed to go for a late dinner. Race, who was getting along with his wife Evon in the same sense that Israel gets along with Palestine, spent most of the day in furious, belligerent argument with her, and decided to take his own boat home and leave her to make her own way.

Distracted in the peaceful night air by the sight of a friend’s house high upon a passing clifftop, Race turned his attention back to the river in front of him to see a giant black shape hoving into view: it was a thirty-six foot cabin cruiser, running at night without any lights on. Unable to avoid a collision, Race’s boat collided with the rear end of the boat, continuing up over the top of the cruiser.

Race himself was flung backwards out of his boat into the water, sustaining a broken nose, a slashed leg and almost biting his tongue clean in half. Fighting his way to the surface, he saw other people floundering in the deep water and, locating a large piece of debris, managed to pull two of the passengers out of the river and help them hang onto the wood until they could all be rescued.

Showing a staggering gratitude, both the people he rescued from drowning would later sue him for having caused the accident in the first place. In the end, both parties were held equally to blame: but Race, injured and not in the best of moods, so angered a water patrolman attending the scene that the man attempted to railroad him with false accusations of intoxication and assault, and Race’s wife, who would file for divorce the next day, testified that Race was drunk as a skunk at the time of the accident, despite not having been there. Fortunately for Race, the jury agreed with him that this was not the case, as did an appeals judge.

*We’re obligated here to inform anyone not living in or around London, England that ‘boat race’ is Cockney rhyming slang for ‘face’.