8 Wrestlers Who Were Nearly KILLED By Fans

Ole Anderson didn't so much turn the fans' screws with his heelish antics, so much as strip their head entirely. Indeed, so good was the future Horseman at raising the crowd's ire that one particularly pointy night in Greensboro, NC nearly ended in tragedy.

After failing to wrest the NWA World Tag Team straps from Tim Woods and Dino Bravo at a Greensboro Memorial Auditorium show on 24 May 1976, Ole and fictional brother Gene (the only true Anderson of the clan) trudged backstage. But before they could reach the curtain, Oscar Ramsey - an NWA regular and septuagenarian - took a piece out of Ole with a hawkbill knife.

Anderson's 79-year-old attacker left him seriously wounded. He was swiftly taken to a local medic... hospital, where he immediately underwent a four-hour operation to repair severed tendons in his arm, and received over a dozen stitches to close chest lesions.

Whilst a week resting up watching This Morning would be the order of the day for most normal folk, it wasn't for Ole, a man as tough as stewed boots. Just two days later, he was back shooting Mid-Atlantic Wrestling tapings, with announcer Bob Caudle understating, "Nothing is going to slow Ole Anderson down!"

Police concluded that Ramsey had been caught in a scuffle between fans throwing chairs at the wrestlers - with the wrestlers promptly hoying them back. In the end, it was decided the sport was the wild west, and no charges were brought against the elderly assailant.