During a recent interview with Stephanie Chase of Digital Spy, AEW Superstar Ortiz commented on nearly losing his finger during the Stadium Stampede Match at last year’s AEW Double or Nothing pay-per-view event, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On the Inner Circle’s entrance for the Stadium Stampede Match at last year’s AEW Double or Nothing: “They took each of us one by one to stand up there and hook us in. It had to be the two biggest people at each end. So I remember the guy that was rigging us he goes, ‘Alright, so who’s going to be first to go up?’ [Jake] Hagar looks at me, he’s like, ‘Brother, that’s you, that’s all you.’ So I had no choice but to be the first one to go up. I remember going up there and I was standing up there by myself and then the rigger went back down and left me there by myself and my whole life was just flashing because I was like, ‘I’m really up here about to propel down maybe like 100 feet or more. This is my life right now, holy sh*t.’ There’s no way I would ever forget that. I could be going senile at 90 and I think that memory will still be there. It was such a wild experience.”
On nearly losing a finger during the entrance: “I wasn’t wearing gloves. So when I jumped, out of instinct I grabbed the rope in front of me. But you have this carabiner hooked up and it’s like this thick metal carabiner, so with the slack of me getting pulled up, it cut my finger. So I actually wrestled the rest of Stadium Stampede with a bandage around my finger and it cut pretty deep – it left a scar. But I was like, ‘Man if I would have grabbed it differently my finger would have just went flying off but I would have had no choice but to do the entrance because it was one take, that’s it. But yeah, luckily I didn’t lose my finger.”