Steve Maclin recently took some time to reflect on the unfortunate way that his TNA Sacrifice main event performance against Mike Santana went.
Maclin was booked last month to headline a TNA special live event against World Champion Santana in a match he said was allotted 26 minutes of the show. However, their match ended in its opening minutes after a dropkick clipped Maclin in the head and visibly wobbled him.
The TNA veteran walked through the exchange during a recent appearance on his Boots to Boots podcast.
“We got about two and a half minutes into exchanging. We tried to wrestle a little bit to still be kind of there. Be a little physical with it, then we just said, ‘Ah, f*** it. Let’s throw the gloves off and just start hitting eachother.’ Back and forth, back and forth, Mike took off, gave me a good old TNA kick to the gut. I hit him with a forearm in the ropes, then I hit the ropes, then the next thing I remember… Well, actually, I wasn’t knocked out. The next thing I know is I’m on the ground trying to figure out what’s going on with my body, even though my head from the neck up is normal. And this is the first time I’ve ever been rocked in a match where that’s the complete opposite. Normally, my body’s good and you’re just in autopilot moving, and your brain is just like ‘All right, we’ll get there.’ … But this was the complete opposite, and it scared the hell out of me at first. You see me grab the rope [as I fell], and training always sunk in. Muscle memory of just basics… That saved me from possibly going through the ropes or maybe hitting a rope on the way down.”
Maclin went down in the classic “fencing” posture seen by many athletes who have suffered a concussion.
“I couldn’t move,” Maclin said. “My body wasn’t computing with my brain. It was the first time, and I was like ‘Oh s***, what are we doing?’ I’m like, ‘Okay, just give me a second.'”
He credits referee Alice Lane as the “savior I needed” in that moment, immediately recognizing that he was hurt and providing him the space to figure out what would happen next.
“She proved that she’s very proficient at her job that night just because she stepped in, she knew something was wrong,” Maclin said about Lane. “And when she was talking to me, I was coherently talking to her like we are now … My body just said no. And she called for the X.”
Maclin also spent a moment giving credit to TNA staffer Ace Steel, who helped convince him in that moment that he couldn’t keep going. While Maclin briefly thought that he was able to continue with the match, he recalled being calmly told by Steel: “You’re done.”
“Everybody else was like, ‘What do you want to do?’ I was like, ‘I want to continue,'” Maclin remembers. “I even said to Carlos [Silva], like, I should be winning this match. He got a laugh out of that one. But, [Steel] was the saving grace in that moment. Everybody was the saving grace in that moment because it was handled so perfectly by the TNA staff and medical and I was taken care of so quickly in the back and right to the hospital.”
While Maclin passed medical tests after the incident, he has still taken some time away from the ring to recover from what he called a “freak accident.” Bummed out by how his high-stakes match went, the 38-year-old nonetheless has a hunger for what’s next once he returns.
“I got in the ring yesterday,” he said. “My back is killing me from the ropes, but my head’s good, my neck’s a little sore, so we’re still icing and doing that. When I come back, it’s hell. We’re going to lay down that lead.”
