During the latest edition of his “Something to Wrestle” podcast, Bruce Prichard commented on Joey Mercury’s gruesome face injury at WWE Armageddon 2006, the backstage reaction to it, and more. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Joey Mercury’s gruesome face injury after a ladder spot at WWE Armageddon 2006: “From my vantage point, it was just horrible. It was ugly and we were concerned. Having been in a situation where Brock Lesnar had kicked a wall into my face and not knowing if my eye was there, I was afraid because we looked and Joey’s face was just a mask of blood. No one could tell other than that he was badly injured. So, we immediately sent the trainer down to go assess what the hell is going on in there and get him out of there. Joey didn’t want to go. Joey wanted to stay in the match. But the initial assessment, we looked at it and we got him back immediately and got him wrapped up because, again, there was the fear of losing his eye. No one knew the extent of how bad this injury could be.”
On the backstage reaction after the injury: “We called for an ambulance and there’s a law that when you’re in a building – first of all, we have our own medical team there, but we also always have an ambulance service there. The building usually has an ambulance service, and they can double. So, you can have the building and you can use it. The only thing is, there always has to be an ambulance there. If someone goes in the ambulance, you’ve got to wait for another ambulance to come and replace the ambulance you’re taking that person to the hospital in. So, when you have a dangerous situation like this where someone is injured severely and you’re looking at it, and they’re going, ‘We’ve gotta wait for the next ambulance to get here.’ I was like, ‘No, you need to go.’ Stephanie McMahon, I remember her pounding on the window of the ambulance just saying, ‘You’re gonna go, and you’re gonna go now.’ They pulled up like they were gonna go, but they didn’t leave. Boy, that brought all of us out and eventually got them to leave, and the second ambulance showed up about five minutes later. It’s scary stuff like that that people don’t understand. So, now we try to do two ambulances so that if something happens, it can go. It’s very frustrating on the other side of that. Joey was a trooper. He was coherent the whole time and nobody knew how bad it was gonna be. Thankfully, it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. But it was an ugly one.”
(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
