Former WWE referee Jimmy Korderas was the latest guest on Prime Time with Sean Mooney and talked about Korderas’ first-hand experience of being in the ring during Owen Hart‘s tragic fall at the Over The Edge PPV in 1998. He and Mooney also talked about how kind and good-natured Owen was with “ribbing” and what the locker room mentality was when it came to extravagant entrances such as Owen’s. Some quotes are below (transcription credit should go to Dominic DeAngelo at WrestleZone):
Sean Mooney on the kindness of Owen Hart:
“I thought he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and not just in wrestling. I really thought he was just such a great guy and genuinely fun-loving. A guy that was a big ribber, but you know what was different with him, Jimmy is that is they were fun-natured. It wasn’t like it was mean spirited. God, just so funny.”
Jimmy Korderas on an particular in-ring Owen prank:
“Even in the ring, Edge and Christian versus Owen Hart & Jeff Jarrett. We were in Germany in a tag match. We did the ‘old pulling a foreign object out of his tights’ and hitting Edge with it behind my back and Edge selling. We’re doing the back-n-forth where we’re discussing it to Jeff and I’m checking and Christian is complaining and Edge is selling like he’s getting hit with brass knuckles and stuff. We finally get to the end spot where he’s got it hidden it under his armpit and I start to make him raise his arm and when he raises his arm, it’s a napkin. Edge is selling like he’s hitting with a ton of bricks. And when the napkin’s floating around everybody just broke out laughing. He was so much fun. He was so much fun.”
On if he thought Owen coming down from the ceiling was considered dangerous or if it was just considered the nature of the business:
“Pretty much the latter because at the time Sting was doing something similar in WCW, repelling from the ceiling and stuff like that. So for me, like again, personally for me, I couldn’t do it because I have this fear of heights so I wouldn’t be able to do something like that. It’s easy to say in hindsight ‘oh, yeah they shouldn’t have done it, it was dangerous’ but at the time you’re not thinking like that. You’re thinking ‘oh, this is part of the entertainment process of wrestling.’ It’s something that had been done before without incident. So you don’t think that anything this terrible would happen. It was just a rough day all around. It was a tragic accident that happened and obviously it affected a lot of people that day.”
Korderas also talks about the actual occurrence of the fall and Jerry Lawler telling him how the situation could have been much worse if Korderas was any closer.
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