Former WWE Doctor Frank Romascavage recently sat down with Nick Hausman of Wrestling Inc. to talk about a variety of topics including Mick Foley’s infamous Hell in a Cell drop.
Dr. Romascavage said “I was there that night. That was an unbelievable event. Here’s Undertaker, he’s 7’0”, and he puts his big right hand up there, and there’s Foley up top of his arm and guess what happens? He goes down 10 feet and then another 10 feet, so he goes down 17 – 20 feet straight down. The guy was severely hurt. I sewed his whole mouth up. He’s bleeding, a couple teeth through his nose. What happened after that, I was in the ring. You’ll see me in that match. I’m in the ring there, and Mick, he got beat up. He was hurting big time. I said, ‘Mick, come on. We’re gonna get you through this.’ I took him in the back in the locker room back there. Teeth through, the whole bit there. We got the teeth on ice, sewed up his mouth for him, and he laid there. I said, ‘I’m going to sew you up real quick.’ I was an ER doctor so sewing up mouths and all that, I’ve done it many, many times throughout my medical career. So what happened is is I sewed him up. The teeth, we put them on ice.”
He continued by talking about the irony of being in Pittsburgh for the event. He said, “The best irony of the whole situation is if you ever get stuck, and I tell this to about all my patients here at my practice, where if you have an acute dental problem and you’re near Pittsburgh, you couldn’t be in a better place. University of Pittsburgh has a 24/7 on-call orthodontic dental type program. I called up the dentists or the dental orthodontic guy, whoever was on call, and I said, ‘Do you like wrestling?’ He says, ‘I love wrestling.’ I said, ‘Well, tonight I’m gonna make your night. I have Mick Foley over here. He’s got his teeth. I want you to put those teeth back where they belong,’ and he did, so I sent him over the dental school. I sewed up his whole mouth, and he went right over to the dental school. He fixed him up.”
Crazily enough, Foley was sent back out for the main event later that night when Stone Cold and Kane had a match. Romascavage said “I forget how many stitches. I put a bunch in his mouth. In fact, if you read his book, he’ll probably tell you how many I did put in his mouth. Anyway, whatever the lag time was, he did go over shortly thereafter, and guess what happened? The guy put his teeth in for him. He surprised everybody by going back out, but he did. That’s how he is.”
It was never easy telling wrestlers that were not cleared to compete in matches. Speaking on this, Romascavage said “I never had to sit somebody down and say, ‘no, you can’t do it.’ I would see people, they hurt their knee real bad. They would have been to an orthopedic guy somewhere. If I see somebody that got hurt in a match, you’d talk to them to see how they go. I would keep on them on a daily basis by talking to them over the phone. It wasn’t one of those type of relationships. Make sure they were good and if they weren’t good, you make sure they went to see somebody. We always had everybody’s best interest. If there was a particular type of problem, we get them to the right specialist.”
Thanks to Wrestling Inc. for providing the transcriptions and interview that you can listen to here.
