William Regal discussed a car accident he was involved in before Spring Stampede 1997, as well as an incident he had on a plane, on this week’s “Gentleman Villain” podcast.
Regal recounts a tragic car accident in which Chris Benoit, Nancy Sullivan, and himself were involved before his match with Prince Laukea at the 1997 Spring Stampede:
“That particular day, I hadn’t taken anything (drugs). I got up early, got in the car, and went to the gym because we had to be at the building at two o’clock for the Pay-Per-View. In the car with me was Chris Benoit and Nancy Sullivan,” Regal said.
“We went to the gym. We left the gym. As we were coming off the ramp to where our hotel is to get showered and to get back to the building at two, I’m at the stop sign. I look in the mirror and I can see a car barreling at a ridiculous speed up behind me and I can’t do anything because I’m at a stop sign and this car is crossing. Chris sat next to me and Nancy was in the back. I’m trying not to freak them out, but I can see this car is going to hit us. There’s no way I can go anywhere. There was a car at the side of me and I’m going to get rear ended.”
“This guy hit us. I have no idea what speed, and flipped my car three times, and it was actually my car. Were upside down on the roof. The only thing that saved all of us was I was in a Ford Explorer. The roof was crushed against my head. So if I’d have been in anything else, I think it would have killed us. I was upside down with the roof crushed on my head. I look across and Chris is angling with his tongue out and I look across at Nancy and her eyes are closed. I think they’re both dead.”
“I lean across to the back first. I get myself out. I lean across to the back. I undo Nancy’s seatbelt and I somehow kick a back window out. It’s already cracked and broken and the car is crushed. I kick her out and I push her out. I’m upside down. While they’re upside down, I flipped over now in this pile. I’m pushing her through the opening in the door in the glass. Then I get Chris out and I kick the window out and I push him out.”
“I can see this car that hit us. I see a guy get out of it. He was just drunk as a skunk. I can see him. He’s just staggering about and he swapped places with the teenage lad, and I can see this clear as day. Then the police came. Chris and Nancy have come to now. The police come and I’m going, ‘Listen. That fella was driving that car, not this young lad.’ What happened eventually I find out, and this is a while later, I don’t know, good old boys network or whatever going on in Mississippi, this fella got away with it.”
“I can’t remember anything else after that. So for about 10 minutes, I remember talking to the police, but I cannot remember anything until a day and a half later. Now later on I find bits and things out. Being the kind of pros that we were, and nothing but stupidity, we get the police to take us straight from this car wreck to the hotel, get our stuff, and get to the building for two o’clock so that we’re on time. Now I can’t remember any of this. This is just stuff I found out later.”
“I have that match that night with Prince Iaukea. I have no recollection of it. Again, I wasn’t taking anything that day. I heard from a few people a while later, ‘Yeah, you were acting really weird that day. You were just walking around and talking to the walls and stuff.’ Somehow on autopilot, having a major concussion and not knowing what was going on, I can’t remember any of this, but I know because when I came out of it a few days later how bad my neck was again.”
Regal also discussed an incident he had on a plane in 1997:
“There’s an incident that happened on an airplane which has been blown out of proportion to what actually happened. I got on a plane in Tokyo, should have landed in Detroit, to do Nitro. I took some pills. I went to the toilet. The door was one of those old kinds of fashion planes with a concertina door. I stood there and my foot was stopping the door shutting. I hadn’t locked the door. A stewardess came behind me and said, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ I turned around and nothing funny or clever about it, I peed on the lady’s foot. They landed the plane and I woke up in a jail cell in Alaska. I wasn’t the only person on that plane. I wasn’t the reason that they landed that plane,” Regal said.
“There was a paparazzi guy in the back who flipped out and started punching people. That was the reason they landed that and they just threw me off. I’m not going to incriminate anyone, but they threw a couple of other wrestlers off because they were doing things as well. They were like me. They won’t have any idea what they were doing. But I do know what they were doing because WCW investigated this and I found out what they were doing. They got away with it. I didn’t. Soon as this went to court, this lady said, ‘No, he wasn’t doing anything malicious. It was just a drunken incident.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co)
