6 most bizarre and hilarious backstage wrestling stories

KARACHI: The world of pro wrestling is full of as much unbelievable stories backstage as it is with crazy stories on-screen. Much of the life of wrestlers revolves around travelling from city to city to perform and life on the road exposes them to ridiculous to outright bizarre situations.

Internet is full of stories from wrestlers’ lives that some would believe to be lies. But upon years or telling and retelling of some stories, these stories have become legends. And if you’ve ever wondered what these macho men are like in real lives, look no further. We bring you some of the craziest, funniest and even the most ridiculous real life stories from the unique world of professional wrestling.



Ric Flair survives plane crash

How many people can claim they survived a plane crash? Flair is one of the only few luckiest guns alive to have walked out of a plane crash. On October 4, 1975, a Cessna 310 plane carrying a promoter and four wrestlers, including Flair, took off from Charlotte for Wilmington, North Carolina. The incorrect weight distribution caused trouble in the flight taking off and the pilot instead chose to dump off fuel to make the load lighter. Unsurprisingly, the plane ran out of fuel as it approached the Wilmington airport, cutting across several treetops and poles and eventually crashing into the ground. The Nature Boy suffered a broken back in three places and the doctors told him he would never wrestle again. Needless to say, no one is qualified enough to tell the 16-time world champ he can’t do something. Flair was back in the ring 5 months later.

But that’s not enough. He also once survived a lightning strike. After a flight one day, he got off the plane and was walking with an umbrella when he suddenly saw it fly up 50 feet in the air. “Lightning hit the top of my umbrella, bounced off and hit the guy in the eye five feet behind me and killed him. Right there. I just stood there looking at the guy and froze, it scared me to death," the two-time WWE Hall of Famer said on the Dan Le Batard Show on ESPN.

Well, if that isn’t enough to make Flair be considered immortal, then I don’t know what is.



Andre the Giant drinks over 100 beers in 6 hours

Andre the Giant was (obviously) a huge man and clearly with his amazing size, he had the drinking stamina of a whale. Many versions of this story have been told throughout the years but the accurate account comes from The Giant himself. Once on an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman, he admitted to drinking 119 beers in one session.

WWE legend The Fabulous Moolah shared in her autobiography that she saw Andre drink 127 beers and pass out in the hotel lobby. As no one could carry him to his room, the hotel staff draped a piano cover over him and let him sleep. On an episode of WWE's Legends of Wrestling, fellow wrassler Mike Graham confirmed he witnessed Andre consume 156 beers in one night. Seriously, just reading about this unbelievable feat gives us a hangover.

Undertaker is afraid of cucumbers

Ha ha ha, who would have thought? The man who ruled the WWE for nearly three decades is afraid of cucumbers. His late manager Paul Bearer once revealed he pranked Taker by stuffing his iconic hat and gloves with cucumbers. When taker saw the hat, he threw up all over it. If any one of his WrestleMania opponents had known better, they should’ve just brought cucumbers to the ring to conquer Taker’s undefeated streak way before Lesnar did.



Roddy Piper wants to hunt an alligator

In 1984, Piper was looking for a pair of alligator boots and a belt. So, while travelling through Florida along with fellow wrestlers Kevin Sullivan, Wally Dusek and referee Bill Alfonso, he saw an alligator in a canal nearby and stopped. One of the guys shot at it twice, causing the gator to become motionless. Thinking he was dead, Piper and Sullivan stripped down to their wrestling gears to retrieve the prize. Perhaps inspired by Eddie Guerrero, the gator was playing possum and only showed movement when Piper was close to him. Obviously, it sent the wrestlers running out of the water.

If that’s not enough, Hot Rod also survived a wrestling match with an actual 600 plus-pound bear. Talk about being crazy… or brave (or both).

Haku bites off a man’s nose, breaks handcuffs

Not many people may remember Haku but one can judge him by his reputation of being the most dangerous man to ever step foot in a wrestling ring. He’s also one of the only two people Andre the Giant was scared of (the other being Harley Race). Now if Andre is scared of someone, Haku should be a 20-feet tall man with arms made of iron and shooting bullets out of his mouth. No, Haku wasn’t all that but his reputation of being a badass who mustn’t be messed with comes from several incidents. One of the more popular ones is that he bit off a man’s nose in a bar brawl when the man called wrestling fake. Once he was caught while trying to break up a bar brawl and when the police handcuffed him behind his back, he just looked at them, snapped off the handcuffs and continued to break up the fight. Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts once said if he had a bullet and was safe inside a tank and Haku was in his range, he would rather shoot himself than wound and anger Haku. Lesson: No one messed with Haku.



Plane Ride from Hell

This plane ride will probably be crazier than the one depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street. Can you imagine what would happen if Brock Lesnar, Mr Perfect, Triple H, JBL, Flair, Goldust and X-Pac flew in the same flight? In May 2002, after a UK tour, the wrestlers were flying back to the US and the open bar in the plane resulted in a chaos that’d be remembered decades later. On the now infamously called ‘Plane Ride from Hell’, a drunken Michael Hayes (WWE agent) punched JBL in the face, passed out, and as revenge, X-Pac cut off his mullet. Goldust started serenading his ex-wife and only Jim Ross was able to calm him down. Classic Nature Boy attempted to get the stewardesses’ attention with his iconic robe. And most importantly, Perfect and Lesnar got into a fight over who was the better amateur wrestler and almost opened the emergency door of the plane.

Talk about crazy taken to the next level.

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