Generally speaking, professional athletes face more danger each time they go to work than people in almost any other career do. At any given moment, something minor could go wrong and lead to a serious injury, thereby changing their lives forever. Sometimes, these mistakes will even end a life altogether, with the athlete dying on whatever field it was he or she was making a living on. The only difference between pro wrestling and other sports, in this regard, is that instead of passing on in a literal field, wrestlers run the risk of losing their lives inside the ring.

Thankfully, it’s an extremely rare situation, but a handful of wrestlers have indeed legitimately died in the middle of a wrestling match. The usual causes are heart attacks suffered by men and women whose bodies weren’t able to keep up with the strenuous activity and broken necks so severe they're described as internal decapitations. Either way, something could go seriously wrong in the course of a match, to the point that one of the participants doesn’t live to tell the tale.

In addition to these rare fatal accidents, sports entertainment has seen even more close calls where in-ring deaths very nearly took place. While most of the wrestlers to die in the ring weren’t all that famous (in America, at least), some of the people who almost died were amongst the biggest names in wrestling history. Had things gone differently, their exits from the mortal plane could've changed WWE forever, both on an immediate scale and in the sense things would've gotten a whole lot safer, ushering in an early PG era. For more information, keep reading, and discover 15 wrestlers you didn’t know came close to dying in the ring.

Droz

Look, things were just different in the Attitude Era, alright? No one can really explain why Vince McMahon hired a guy just because he could make himself vomit on command, and there’s no use in trying to figure it out. After all, Darren Drozdov, aka Droz, was a better wrestler than his gimmick would imply, with the look of a superstar and a unique style that helped him stick out in one of the most visible periods in WWE history. Unfortunately, he would nonetheless fail to amount to much in the industry, due to a catastrophic injury suffered during a SmackDown match against D’Lo Brown. Apparently, Droz’s shirt was looser than the average wrestling gear, which caused D’Lo to lose his grip during a running powerbomb and drop Droz on his neck. This led to two fractured discs, in turn, paralyzing Droz and leaving him quadriplegic. Over time, he eventually regained limited use of his arms, but the real miracle is that he even survived in the first place.

“Stone Cold” Steve Austin

Of all the close calls on this list, it goes without saying none would've changed things as much as WWE and the rest of the wrestling world losing “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in the summer of 1997. At this point, the injury Austin suffered at SummerSlam that year is practically equally famous to anything else he did in the ring. To recap anyway, he was wrestling Owen Hart for the WWE Intercontinental Championship, and in the final moments of the match, Hart lost his grip during a sit-out piledriver and legitimately drove Austin headfirst into the mat, jamming and breaking his neck. Austin was temporarily paralyzed from the move, and one of his doctors later claimed he was surprised the damage wasn’t worse, speculating Stone Cold easily could've been “dead on the spot.” Amazingly, Austin not only overcame the injury to become a six-time WWE Champion, but he also got on his feet and finished the match, a feat requiring a superhuman level of resilience to pain.