Paul Heyman has spent his career handling chaos on WWE television, but nothing compared to the phone call he received from his daughter during COVID-19. What he found when he arrived at the scene left him thinking about just how differently the night could have ended.
Speaking to Graham Bensinger, Heyman recalled his daughter leaving home to grab something to eat before calling him roughly 10 minutes later. She told him she had been involved in a bad car accident, and Heyman said there was only one thing he wanted to know.
“My daughter, during COVID, my daughter took her car. She ran out to get something to eat. She calls me. She just left the house 10 minutes earlier. She says, ‘Dad, I’ve been in a bad car accident.’
Everybody’s first inclination is to say, ‘What happened?’ My first question was, ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Are you absolutely okay?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Where are you?’ ‘Here’s where I am.’ ‘On my way.’”
Heyman immediately grabbed his son Jacob and headed for the scene. Even during the drive, his daughter called again because she wanted her father to know the crash wasn’t her fault, but Heyman couldn’t have cared less about assigning blame at that moment.
“I grabbed my son Jacob. I said, ‘Jacob, she’s been in an accident. She’s fine. Let’s go.’ Jacob gets into the car. We’re in the car a minute. We’re five minutes away from where she is, however many minutes. She calls again.
‘Hey, Dad, I just want you to know I did nothing wrong. Wasn’t my fault.’
I don’t care. I don’t care. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Yes.’ All that matters to me. Everything else we can solve.”
Things became a hell of a lot more real once Heyman actually got there. He said police eventually explained that another driver had allegedly been on his phone when he crashed into his daughter, totaling her vehicle.
“And finally, a sergeant came up to me and said, ‘Hey, the kid, he was on the phone, and he smashed your daughter, and the car’s totaled.’
And I saw the car, and it looked like, ‘Oh my God, she got out of there alive, let alone thank God nothing happened to her.’ Because when she got a car, that was my only insistence: five-star crash protection.”
Seeing the wrecked car put everything into perspective for Heyman. Questions about what happened or who was responsible could wait because his daughter was standing there alive and apparently uninjured.
“The only thing on my mind was, ‘You okay? You fine? You okay? You good? You’re not hurt? Move your head around. No? Good?’ I couldn’t care less about anything else.”
For Heyman, his reaction that night came straight from how his own father raised him. Instead of immediately demanding explanations when something went wrong, the first priority was making sure his child was safe enough to still be there the next day.
“That comes from my father. It’s not, ‘What happened? Why did this happen? Why didn’t you look to see if someone was flying?’ It’s not that. ‘Are you okay? You’re okay? All right, so we’re going to live, and we’re going to be healthy tomorrow to discuss this.’”
Heyman knew the alternative could have been unimaginably worse. Looking at the condition of his daughter’s totaled car made the usual questions about responsibility seem pretty damn insignificant compared to knowing he wasn’t spending the next two days planning his child’s funeral.
“So anything that she could have done wrong, which she didn’t, we could have discussed the next day, instead of am I at a hospital grieving over some tragic thing that happened to my child, let alone am I sitting there the next 48 hours picking out a casket? That comes from my father.”
It’s a side of Heyman that wrestling fans rarely get to see. Behind all the promos and larger-than-life characters, his reaction that night was simply that of a terrified father who got the one answer he needed to hear — his daughter was okay.
How did you feel hearing Paul Heyman open up about such a frightening moment involving his daughter and the lesson he carried forward from his own father? Let us know what you think in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
