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Former WWE Doctor Talks About Treating Mick Foley After Hell in a Cell Fall

July 3, 2021 | Posted by Joseph Lee

In an interview with Wrestling Inc, former WWE doctor Frank Romascavage, who worked there from 1993-2006, spoke about treating Mick Foley after his Hell in a Cell fall at King of the Ring 1998. Here are highlights:

On treating Foley after his fall: “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. 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.”

On if there was hesitation to send Foley back out for the main event: “No, but you have to understand one thing, these guys are superb athletes and personalities when it comes to how it has to be. Mick, I know him very, very well. We became, obviously, great friends after that. I got done sewing his mouth up. 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.”

On if he ever had to tell a wrestler they couldn’t perform due to injury: “I can’t think of an exact situation where that would have been apropos. 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.”

article topics :

Mick Foley, Joseph Lee