Nunzio’s two most replayed moments with The Undertaker were both things nobody asked him to do, and he only found out one of them had landed when he got back through the curtain.
The first is the dive. Nunzio, in the ring with The Undertaker and having no interest in tying up with him, kept offering a leg and pulling it away until The Undertaker made a noise at him and he threw himself over the top rope. He explained on Insight with Chris Van Vliet that it started on a house show.
“It’s always the things that you don’t plan on doing. It wasn’t a plan, you know. It was like I was in there. We weren’t gonna tie up. I think we did that on a house show first or something.”
“I was feeding him my leg, and I was feeding him my leg, and feeding my leg, and then when he oofed at me, I just dove out.”
Once it worked, it became a fixture.
“So that was just a natural. It just happened. I did it, and he reacted, and I jumped, and then we made that a spot on the house shows.”
He has a rule about spots like that.
“Once you do it on TV, you can’t do it anymore.”
The second is the one people still bring up. Hoisted up for the Last Ride, Nunzio made the sign of the cross while suspended in the air. That was not planned either.
“I know the sign of the cross thing. I see all the time that Pat Patterson loved that. That was another thing that I had not planned until he hoisted me up. I just did it.”
He did not think anything of it until he was backstage.
“It’s something I did that I never would have known, but has been talked about forever. And when I went back to the dressing room, Pat Patterson was like, oh my God, that was great. Like, what was great? I didn’t realize that that was such a big deal.”
He also did not know how long he was going to be up there. The Undertaker held him for around ten seconds.
“No, I didn’t know how long. But I did take the last ride from him a couple of times already on house shows and stuff like that.”
The one lasting effect was on his gear.
“But we stretched out my trunks. I couldn’t use them anymore. That’s a lie. But he did stretch them out.”
Twenty years later, WWE brought him back to do it again, and this time it was an instruction. Nunzio returned on November 6, 2024, on NXT to challenge Tony D’Angelo for the North American Championship, and was asked to repeat the spot when D’Angelo lifted him for his finish.
“Matt Bloom actually said, ‘Hey, do that thing you did with the Undertaker when he picks you up for the choke slam. I was like, okay. So I was told to do that. It wasn’t the first time. It just happened.”
He does not think it worked as well the second time.
“I don’t think it had the same feeling.”
Both men knew why.
“They knew exactly what you were doing.”
Getting to that match took some arranging. Nunzio said Paul Heyman texted him while he was walking through Manhattan on his way to a Broadway show with his wife, telling him he would receive a phone call and to answer it. The call was an offer to work NXT. The obstacle was medical clearance, and he had days, not months.
“The hardest part was going to get a physical. I had to get all this stuff done to me within like five days, which it takes months to get the appointment.”
“So I had to go to my personal doctor, who knew what I did for many years, and I said, listen, I got an opportunity to go back to WWE for the night. I said, if I got to get this done, I can’t wait. I need an EKG. I need a stress test. They made me do all this stuff before the match, and if it didn’t get done, I would have never been able to do it.”
The show came from the 2300 Arena in Philadelphia, the building that housed ECW, where Nunzio spent the formative years of his career as Little Guido.
“It made sense, and I’m glad Paul thought of me. Bubba was there and a few other guys, so that’s how it really came about.”
The story was set up on television the week before, with Nunzio leaving D’Angelo a voicemail that went unanswered, and D’Angelo had floated the idea publicly on a podcast days earlier. Nunzio appeared with Tony Mamaluke in his corner, reuniting the Full-Blooded Italians on WWE television, and lost. It was his first WWE match in 16 years, after being released in August 2008.
Nunzio is 54 and still works independent dates, though he says he picks them carefully now. He is a former WWE Cruiserweight Champion. The Undertaker retired in 2020 and runs creative for AAA.
