On TMZ Inside The Ring, Titus O’Neil shared the immediate backstage reaction to his memorable slide under the ring at the Greatest Royal Rumble. He had tripped while running down to the ring as an entrant and luckily avoided hitting the steel post under the ring.
“Yeah. Everybody asked me, you know, are you okay? And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m okay.’ And then people start laughing,” O’Neil recalled. “And I looked at Vince McMahon and I said, ‘So I get a new T-shirt.’ And he was like, ‘Ah, absolutely.’ And he just laughed”.
The moment quickly turned into a merchandising opportunity. “And, you know, I got the t-shirt and action figure with the whistle, and I love that”.
O’Neil also put the embarrassing moment into financial perspective. “People ask me all the time, like, you know, ‘where you’re embarrassed,’ and I’m like, ‘for a brief second I was, while I was under the ring, but then I got up and I kept going and kept it moving, and I wasn’t hurt. My house is paid off. My kids went to private school in high school… I’m debt-free. I’m stress-free”.
“People wake up and they stuff their toe on the side of their bed, and they still got a mortgage to pay,” he added. “Yeah, I slid under a ring in Saudi Arabia. I don’t have a mortgage to pay anymore. Yeah, you can laugh at me all you want, but I’m laughing”.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit TMZ Inside The Ring with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. You can listen to the full episode on Apple and Spotify.
