Ouch: Colt Cabana Explains How His Socks Nearly Killed Him Against Chris Jericho

That’s rather serious. There are all kinds of issues that can take place before, during and after a wrestling match that can put wrestlers in danger. It can create various problems for anyone and some of them can be very serious. Now a wrestler is revealing how rough things got for him during a recent nationally televised match that you probably didn’t notice at the time.

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Back on the November 2 Dynamite, Colt Cabana made a surprise appearance and unsuccessfully challenged Chris Jericho for the Ring Of Honor World Title. Cabana has since spoken about the match on his Art Of Wrestling podcast, revealing that choosing to wear a pair of compression socks caused issues during the match. Cabana claims that wearing the socks nearly killed him due to blood circulation issues. Here are some of his comments, with transcription courtesy of 411mania.com:

On What Happened

“A couple of weeks ago, I wrestled Chris Jericho. And I wanted to share the story of how I almost died wrestling Chris Jericho. Not a lot of people know this story, some of the people in the back know this story. The doctors know this story. I’m not telling this story to make an excuse; nobody would have even known. Everyone complimented me on my match and I’m appreciative for that. But this is just a fun story and in 20 years I will laugh about it. In the moment, I did not laugh…I guess a couple weeks afterward I can laugh about it.

On His Usual Gear

“Of course, in my laundry room is my wrestling gear. I’ll wash my kneepads, I’ll wash my singlet. I don’t dry them though, just wash them, hang dry them. Of course, I wash my wrestling socks… I don’t know where my wrestling socks went, they went somewhere. I like long black soccer socks, wong wrestling socks, so there isn’t a gap between my boots and kneepads… So before I was going to wrestle Chris Jericho, I had to go out and buy new pair of socks. And of course I procrastinated, so I waited till the night before.

On Things Going Badly

“I wrestled Chris Jericho. Now of course that match, there was many emotions, there was a lot of tension going into it. My anxiety was high, tensions were high, the building was hot. So as I go to wrestle Jericho, I put on my compression socks, my kneepads, and my boots. And what I don’t realize is that I have essentially made a tourniquet in the bottom half of my body…

“Essentially what I did was restrict everything. I remember vividly thinking, ‘I can’t feel my legs. I guess it’s just the nerves.’ But it was nerves, it was the anxiety. But it was also the compression socks. And by the time I did the moonsault to the outside and had to run into the ring to give Jericho a flying asshole I had nothing left in my body. And I attributed it to the night of wrestling. But no, it was because I cut off the supply of blood to my own legs, causing high blood pressure and low, low oxygen. I knew I was on live TV and it was big moment for me, I figured a way to do it to Jericho knowing the match would come to an end very quickly.”

And On Dealing With The Problem After The Match

“I could not move. And as I made my way back to the trainer’s room asking for electrolytes and the trainer being like, ‘We’re not sure what’s going on.’ And me just saying, ‘I gotta get this stuff off of me, I feel so compacted.’ And I ripped my singlet off and it still didn’t feel like enough. And I couldn’t breathe, I felt lightheaded, and I had a headache and my head was pounding.

“And then I’m just, ‘Can you take my boots off?’ And I felt like such a schmuck asking a grown man to take my boots off… he rips my boots off, and then I’m like, ‘Can you take my kneepads, I just feel so constricted.’ And he takes my kneepads off, and then, ‘Can you get my socks off?’ And I say, ‘You know, I bought these compression socks last night.’ And then the eyes of the trainers are just like, ‘What?’ As I was asked to lay back for the next two hours while ice was put all over my body, I was educated as to why you should not professionally wrestle in front of 10,000 people and almost a million people at home in compression socks.”

This could have been different. Check out the match and fallout:

Opinion: That is one of those stories that makes for a pretty insane headline and then gets more interesting once you hear the whole story. Cabana seemed to have a completely fine match and then it turns out that things were a lot more serious than it seemed. At least things worked out well in the end, but that must have been quite the scary situation for Cabana at the time.