As a wrestling fan, few had as much of an impact on me as Jake Roberts and Ricky Steamboat. As two of my childhood favorites, I never missed an opportunity to see them in action.
But roughly 40 years after they excited us the seemingly inevitable repercussions have caught up with Ricky Steamboat, or so Roberts fears.
Roberts’ comments about Steamboat’s health and him talking about his DDT on the concrete on Saturday Night’s Main Event have made their rounds on social media.
Jake Roberts Concerned for Ricky Steamboat’s Health
It’s yet another reminder that wrestlers aren’t the super humans they appear to be on television, as they each have their personal demons and other issues to deal with.
Roberts’ struggles have been well documented while Steamboat has avoided falling into some of the pitfalls.
The pair will always be linked following their match on Saturday Night’s Main Event when Roberts’ DDT on the concrete floor went wrong.
He didn’t want to do it
On an episodes of DDP Snake Pit Roberts revealed Steamboat is dealing with some health issues but he didn’t say what they were.
His following comments give us reason to suspect it has to do with CTE or something similar when he talked about how others, including Steamboat, tried to convince him to hit his DDT on a concrete floor.
He explained how it was a dangerous move and he hopes it’s not contributing to Steamboat’s health issues.
“Bottom line is you cannot be down on a hard surface. If it’s a hard surface, you’re going to splatter your brains. Back in my drinking days I did it a few times in bars and other stuff. I got in trouble in there. And they didn’t get up. Even when I did it to Hogan on a platform, which has a lot of give, but it didn’t have enough because it split Hogan’s skull.
“I’m not going to tell you the guys who suggested it to me. I was told by these guys to pick somebody out of the locker room and DDT them on the concrete, intentionally, in hopes of killing. I was like ‘what?’ They were like ‘dude, you’ll be the most over heel ever.’ ‘I don’t want to kill somebody, what are you talking about?’ They encouraged me to do it, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.
“Doing Steamboat, I argued in the back ‘no, it cannot be done.’ And Steamboat had the affiliation with George Scott, who had been the booker in Mid Atlantic and gave Steamboat his big break. And George went to Steamboat with that idea, of me dropping him on the concrete. And Steamboat argued with me ‘please man, do it for me. I can block it; I can get my hands down in time.’ ‘No, you won’t, it won’t work.’”
As we all know, Steamboat wasn’t able to block the move and he was knocked unconscious by the move and Roberts was afraid he killed him.
“And it didn’t work. When I dropped Steamboat, I thought he was dead, I really did. Picking up, it was like ‘holy s—.’ I herniated myself getting him into the ring. If you watch that film, you’ll see me pointing at Steamboat and point at George Scott, because George Scott had come down and gotten in the ring.
“I was like ‘there George, I hope your freaking happy because he’s dead.’ I was surprised he wasn’t, because where his head hit, it was a god-awful sound. It was like a watermelon being thrown on concrete. It popped like something broke. It took two weeks for his eyes to turn black. It swelled up four inches.
“To be quite honest with you, I know Steamboat’s having issues right now. I hope to hell it wasn’t what I did. I really do, man, because that haunts me. That’s beginning to haunt me a lot. Ricky, if you’re listening, you know I never meant to do that. I didn’t want to do that. I begged you not to do that. I just pray for you man. He’s a good dude man.”
There have been reports that Steamboat’s remained busy as he recently worked as booker with Major League Wrestling and we hope his health concerns aren’t as serious as we fear.
If there’s one good thing to come out of this, the WWE soon started putting gym mats on the floor, but the damage was already done.
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