Every time a professional wrestler steps into a ring they out their life and careers on the line to entertain us, and one of those unexpected moments came on This Day in Wrestling History on March 7, 1988.
The setting was Saturday Night’s Main Event, one of my favorite wrestling shows when I was growing up and I never missed a week of it.
But we never had a clue that something had happened to cause a real injury to Harley Race.
There are plenty of reasons, but the main one is Race’s toughness. He ranks as one of the hardiest wrestlers in history, and he worked through the pain to finish the match.
In his own words
Thankfully, there’s been a huge amount of books wrestlers have written over the years and they give us great insights into what went on behind the curtain.
There are plenty of horror stories to go with the stories of glory, and Harley Race had one that had a little of both.
Special thanks to @awrestlinghistorian for the excerpt and additional facts.
“While the King Of The Ring tournament was designed to build up my status to make me a viable challenger, these matches were intended to make Hogan look like the unstoppable force he was through much of that decade.
“It wasn’t planned this way, but the night I did the table stunt with Hogan turned out to be the last in our series. It’s a crazy enough stunt as it is, but here I was in the twilight of my career, letting Hulk Hogan toss me through a perfectly good table. You’d think we would have used some sort of rigged table like the breakaway bottles that actors always used in those western movie, but ‘safety first’ isn’t exactly the motto of professional wrestling so, of course, we didn’t think of that. Like an idiot, I didn’t even go out to the ring and look at the table before the match.
“I had no problem going through the table when I hit it. It didn’t even hurt that much…until I tried to get up, that is. That’s when the steel band that wraps around the edge of the table recoiled and hit me just above the pelvic bone. I would have been better off if the damn thing would have just hit the bone and broke it. Still, I just shrugged it off and kept wrestling. That’s not to say that it didn’t hurt. It burned like Hell.
“About a week later, I started feeling abdominal pains, but pain was nothing. I had learned to live with a lot worse so again, I shrugged it off and kept going. I kept wrestling and I was looking forward to Wrestlemania IV just weeks away.” – Harley Race King Of The Ring book
The injury Race sustained was a slowly leaking ruptured intestine that caused an infection that almost took his life.
It was this match that helped to bring an end to his phenomenal career.
Race was a great performer that I loved watching and I hated to see him go, but things happen and life moves on.
He made his share of This Day in Wrestling History moments, and this is one that carriers as much weight as any other as it appears to have hastened the end of a legend’s career.
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