8 Wrestlers Who Got KNOCKED OUT (... & Still Finished Matches)
7. Mick Foley
Per Mick Foley's own recollection of everything that happened in the immediate aftermath of King Of The Ring 1998, Vince McMahon instructed him to never go that far again - "that far" being to agree to being launched clean off of the roof of the Hell In A Cell structure through the table below with the genuine grace and flair of a trained cinematic stuntman.
Of course, by this point he was well into the practice of taking skull-smashing chair shots to the head on a near-weekly basis and bumps that resulted in him splatting on the equally unforgiving WWE canvas from great and/or similar heights, but the spectacular nature of Foley's iconic dive drew attention to it as the bridge too far. Or was that the shot of his bloodied face with a tooth hanging delicately from his nose after, just minutes later, he went through the roof of the cell to the unforgiving ring below?
Either way, Foley's physical crimes against himself were perhaps best captured not by the company's in-house camerawork, but by the late Beyond The Mat creator Barry Blaustien, who shared a voicemail he received while 'Mrs Foley's Baby Boy' was at his wooziest in the aftermath. In just about every respect, it was the most monetised bump of a maniacal bumper's career - definitionally picking the right moment, he found his fall immortalised on the silver screen as well as WWE's for the better part of three decades. The sheer danger alone defines the Attitude Era as much as any beer bash or Rock Bottom; the fall a perfect contrast to the rise of a wrestling empire approaching an unthinkable second mainstream boom.