Mark Henry Explains How WWE Really Came Up With Mae Young Giving Birth To A Hand

Few moments in WWE history live forever like the night Mae Young gave birth to a hand. It was shocking, ridiculous, unforgettable—and now Mark Henry has laid out exactly how it happened, who knew, who didn’t, and how close one WWE executive came to throwing up on live television.

While speaking with Inside the Ropes, Henry explained that the entire thing began with him being told, casually, that Mae Young was going to be pregnant on TV. That alone made zero sense to him. When he was told it would happen over just a few weeks, he pushed back immediately.

“You get to TV one day and they say we’re going to have Mae pregnant. How does that go? I said, ‘That’s not how it works. It takes nine months.’ And they’re like, ‘We’re not going to do it in nine months, Mark.’”

At that point, Henry realized logic was no longer part of the equation, but he still wanted to know the destination. He repeatedly asked Vince McMahon what the payoff was supposed to be.

“Man, I asked Vince at least two or three times. He would never answer me. And I would be like, ‘Man, why is she getting pregnant? ‘Cause like… she’s not going to have a baby and this and that.’ And he was like, ‘Don’t worry, Mark. It’s going to come to a great conclusion.’”

Henry said nobody would give him details until the actual day of the segment. That’s when Pat Patterson pulled him aside and treated the reveal like sensitive medical news.

“So the day of, Pat Patterson comes to me and goes, ‘Did you hear what’s going on?’ I was like, ‘No, what’s going on, Pat?’ And he’s like, ‘You sit down. You gotta sit down. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.’ And then he told me, and I said, ‘A hand?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”

Patterson also warned Henry not to tell Gerald Brisco because of how he’d react.

“He said, ‘Look, Gerald Brisco don’t know, so don’t tell him. Gerald Brisco has a very weak stomach. If you go tell Gerald Brisco, he’ll just throw up. It’s the best thing ever.’”

That wasn’t the end of Henry’s involvement. Patterson assigned him a job that made the entire situation even more unhinged. He had to help prepare the “birth” material.

“Pat said, ‘I need you to go get a bunch of the food in catering that nobody’s eating and just mix it all together and put it in a plastic [bag].’”

“They went and got this slime, like the kids play with slime, and they put that in the bag. Then they put the hand down inside of it. So it was underneath the sheet.”

Henry encouraged fans to go back and rewatch the segment with this new knowledge because the moment itself tells the whole story. And once the camera hit his face, Henry completely lost it.

“Y’all gotta go back and look at this. When they pulled the hand out, it made a sound like pffffft.”

“You hear the sound effect and you look at me, and I’m laughing like I’m laughing now, and I’m completely useless in the whole deal. I’m just laughing.”

Meanwhile, Brisco’s reaction played out exactly as predicted.

“When they pull that hand out, Gerald Brisco goes ‘BLEEHH!’

Despite winning championships and having serious career moments, Henry admitted nothing topped this for him personally.

“It was the best thing that I ever did in wrestling. I’m telling you, I won championships. I had serious emotional, respectful moments with guys. There ain’t nothing that I enjoy more than that hand.”

What makes the story even more surreal is that none of this was planned months in advance. It was chaos, secrecy, ribbing, slime, catering leftovers, and a rubber hand… all colliding into one of the most infamous moments in WWE history.