Former WWE star Gangrel recently recalled a terrifying WWE accident. He said it happened during one of his famous entrances.
Gangrel was known for his vampire-themed entrance in WWE. He would rise through a ring of fire before matches. Years later, that entrance nearly ended in disaster. The incident happened after he returned for a storyline involving JBL and The Undertaker.
Gangrel recalls frightening WWE entrance accident
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Gangrel explained that WWE no longer had his original entrance lift. Instead, he had to use a much smaller platform that was originally built for Rey Mysterio.
He said, “For whatever reason, they brought me back, and then we were going to work a tag match. It was me and Visser against The Undertaker. So JBL brought me back in for this feud. So they go, ‘We don’t have your regular lift anymore, but we have what Rey Mysterio pops out of,’ which was like. If you can see the padding on the floor, it wasn’t much bigger than this.”
“Three guys aren’t fitting on this. Barely my big butt was fitting on that. So what they didn’t. We went to do a dry rehearsal. But what they didn’t guess, and I heard they fired that whole pyro crew for that is when they started the fire, because it was such a small hole, it backdraft in, so it pulled the flames in on me.”
He said the burns were so severe that skin was hanging from his arm. “So I was standing in this little hole getting barbecued, you know. I literally jumped up. I became the most agile I’ve ever been in my whole life. I jumped up out of there because it was a slow crank lift, because they would just pop and he would come out, right?”
“They were manual cranking, where the other one was a powered lift and everything. So they were, like, cranking, and I’m like, ‘Oh, again, there’s me.’ But I’m actually burning this time. My foot stuck in the first one. I wasn’t burning. It was just really hot in my nuts. This one, I could see the skin. My skin was just hanging off.”
“So, I jumped up, and I was hanging on my skin. So, I get up there, and, like, oh, I go, ‘No, no, it’s cool.’ You know, a smart guy would have went, sued, and retired or something, right? Not me. I was just happy to wrestle. I love wrestling.”
Despite the injury, Gangrel still wrestled the scheduled match. Medical staff cleaned the wound and wrapped his arm before he went out. “They cut the skin off, cleaned it up, and bandaged me up. And then I went… I wrestled.”
“If you look at that match, you’ll see the arm’s a little thicker because I had it all, had it all bandaged up. And then I went, I was out three, four months. I had to get skin grafts and stuff like that.”
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