Amazing Red says he broke his leg doing a spiral tap during a WWE 2K motion capture session the week before the Cruiserweight Classic was due to begin, and that both the game company and WWE told him to keep quiet about it.
Red was signed up for the 2016 tournament and never made it. Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, he described the booking as the last piece falling into place.
“I’m super hyped. This is it. This is finally what this whole thing paid off for. I knew as soon as I stepped foot in any of these matches, confidently, like I’m getting signed.”
The Cruiserweight Classic was a 32-man tournament built around cruiserweight wrestlers from around the world, with qualifying matches held in independent promotions including Progress, Revolution Pro and Evolve. It aired on the WWE Network across four taping dates at Full Sail University starting June 23, 2016. For an independent wrestler in Red’s position, it was the clearest path into the company that had existed in years.
Before the tournament started, he was invited to do motion capture for the video game, something he had wanted for years. He does not recommend it.
“Doing this job sucks so bad. I would never do mocap for anything. Mocap is trash. Anybody that tells you otherwise is a liar. That’s like doing five matches at once. You’re not bumping on the pillow. You’re bumping in the ring. Everything’s legit real, and you’re bumping constantly.”
The move they wanted was one he has never liked.
“They go right into AJ Styles stuff. Spiral Tap. You could do that? Yeah. Let me see. Go up there. Spiral tap. All right. So look, we’re gonna have you do it a couple of times.”
Motion capture requires each variation of a move to be recorded separately, so he was asked to repeat it for missed attempts, connections, and sequences involving weapons.
“So I had to do this move like seven or eight times, and a spiral tap is a move I don’t like because I’m looking at the ground. With the infrared I’m kind of backwards, so I don’t see what I’m doing. I just throw myself. But spiral tap you can see everything, and I’m not a gymnast. I just learned this jumping on the beds, so I’m not really professional doing this.”
By the eighth or ninth attempt, he wanted to stop.
“I get up there, and I just had a gut feeling, like I gotta stop. And the guy goes, can you just do one more, man? I’m so sorry. Can you just do one more? I’m like, damn. My body’s killing me.”
There were two crash pads for the landing, joined in the middle.
“I go up there. For some reason, I just jump, and everything just blacks out for me. I hear this, and I wake up, and I’m on the crash pads, and my leg is backwards. What happened is that whatever flip I did, my one foot went in between the crash pads that connected, and I went the other way, and I heard the loudest, but I didn’t feel nothing.”
He said Loki, who was working the session with him, was the one who realised what had happened.
“Loki screams at the top of his lungs, is anybody gonna help him? He broke his leg. And once he said that, when he took my leg out, it was backwards. Once I saw that, instant pain, heat everywhere, all in my body. And then I start screaming.”
The Cruiserweight Classic began the following week without him.
“I’m bitter about the CM Punk situation. I’m bitter about the No Way Out situation, and this to me was like my last-ditch effort of being a part of WWE, doing a WWE game, no less. Broke my leg in half.”
The CM Punk reference is to Red’s 2005 WWE dark match, his only match for the company, which WWE Vault released on YouTube in December 2024.
He says he was asked not to discuss the injury.
“2K told me to be quiet about it. WWE told me to be quiet about it. He said, don’t worry, because we’re gonna plan to do a season two, and you’ll be right on board for it. Ain’t no season two. I think it ended up being 205 Live. I never got a call for either.”
His recollection is broadly right on that last point. There was no second Cruiserweight Classic. T.J. Perkins won the tournament by beating Gran Metalik in the September 14, 2016 final and became the first WWE Cruiserweight Champion, the division moved to Raw, and 205 Live premiered as a cruiserweight-exclusive show on the WWE Network on November 29, 2016. Several of the wrestlers Red would have faced in the tournament went on to spend years on that show.
Red announced a retirement in 2019, having planned to step away after the tournament, and has returned to wrestling in the years since. He co-founded House of Glory in 2012 and remains its lead trainer.
He has since made his peace with it, crediting the injury with keeping his family together.
“I know why it happened, and that was a blessing in disguise. Breaking my leg was the best thing that happened to me.”
Red returned to TNA at Slammiversary on June 28 in an Ultimate X match, his first appearance for the company in 15 years, and will be inducted into the TNA Hall of Fame alongside ODB and Konnan at Bound for Glory on October 11 at the Yuengling Center in Tampa, Florida.
