Gangrel reflects on his iconic special entrance.
Gangrel’s entrance, with or without The Brood, is one of the most iconic entrances from The Attitude Era. Coming up from the stage while encircled by flames, the entrance was oft-remembered and later, recreated by Edge at SummerSlam 2021 ahead of his first match with Seth Rollins.
Now, Gangrel is looking back on the first time he ever tried the entrance and how it resulted in fire “coming up in his crotch."
“The very first time I did it, we did a dry run. I get there and they came up with this entrance and it was really cool," Gangrel recalled during a recent appearance on The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy. "They said, ‘Watch the lift, it has a shimmy in it. So you gotta wait for it to shimmy and then walk.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, cool.’ I did the dry rehearsal and there was no smoke, the flames didn’t seem as high, it wasn’t dark, and there was nobody in the arena so you were quite aware of it. When we went to go live and do it, the elevator comes up, I see all the people, you just get brought into that moment. I feel the shim but I thought the elevator stopped so I turned to go walk off stage left off the elevator and through the fire and my foot went in between the lift and the stage. So it didn’t come all the way up yet, so it clamped down on my foot.
"Perfect timing, so I was stuck and I had flames up in my balls," he continued. "That’s my very first entrance and it crushed my foot. My foot was – I didn’t tell anybody – my foot was black for three or four months. It was just horrible looking. That’s why I ended up with that gangster limp that I had coming down because my foot got caught and smashed so I had that limp coming down. I was still so damn happy that I didn’t care that my foot was crushed. That’s how that whole walk came about, the whole stagger step. I still walk like that today because I got the jimmy leg now but it started with my foot caught in that elevator because I didn’t look down coming up. I was sitting there literally and the fire was coming up in my crotch and I was pointing down calling, ‘Hey, hey!’ I felt like such an idiot, but it was taped so they cut. You don’t see it but the pyro guys, they ribbed me for a year about that.”
Elsewhere on the podcast, Gangrel spoke about Paige VanZant’s AEW debut at Double or Nothing. Learn more here.
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