Everyone remembers Ricky Saints crushing his trachea during that nasty chair spot with Ethan Page on the May 27, 2025 episode of WWE NXT. What nobody realized is that it almost got a whole lot worse.
Looking back on the match with Chris Van Vliet, Page revealed the chair didn’t just catch Ricky across the throat. As he pulled him down to finish the spot, one of the chair legs came within an inch of taking Ricky’s eye.
“It was bad, yeah. So it could have been worse. I don’t know—I know you do these great clips, and this might be a little zoom-in freeze-frame moment for you—but he almost lost his eye.”
The scary part is that Page didn’t even realize how close it was until he watched the footage back. As Ricky’s throat got caught across the chair, Page grabbed him by the neck and tried to force him down between the legs to complete the sequence. That’s when disaster nearly struck.
“After… so he ends up injuring his trachea across the way the chair was, the way the chair fell. I give him a twisted grin and I’m trying to pull his throat down in between the legs of the chair. So as I’m yanking him down, if you see the footage and you watch the leg closest to the camera, it literally grazes his cheek and you see his cheek after—there’s a mark. It’s like purple, maybe like an inch to an inch and a half. He would have lost his eye. Like… lost his eye.”
Instead of hitting his eye, the chair scraped across Ricky’s cheek hard enough to leave a purple mark. Had it landed just a little differently, Page believes Ricky would’ve walked away without an eye instead of just a damaged trachea.
It’s a frightening detail fans never knew about one of NXT’s most brutal spots—and one that makes the entire sequence even harder to watch in hindsight.
What did you think of Ethan Page’s revelation? Did you realize the chair spot came that close to disaster? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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