Vader talks nearly losing his eye.

[Tired]

If you want to make it in Japan, there are two things you need more than wrestling skill, strength or even knowing the local language. You need to be really tough, and you need to be extremely tough. In a country where every wrestler is tough, Americans Stan ‘The Lariat’ Hansen and Vader in particular have reputations for being tough. They are also two of the reasons why you need to be tough, because they were too of the stiffest performers too. So when they finally collided in 1990, everyone knew it was going to be a hard-hitting match.

But nobody anticipated how brutal things would get. Another thing that Hansen is well known for is his poor eyesight. At one point during the match, he grabbed Vader’s face in a bad way, and accidentally popped out Vader’s eye. Instead of stopping the match and seeking medical help, Vader chose to push the eye back in himself. It was a decision that would leave him half-blind in that eye.

Here is what Hansen and Vader had to say about the IWGP championship match in the Tokyo Dome.

<div class='spoiler_toggle'>Stan Hansen</div><div class="spoiler" style="display:none;">
“Yeah, that was a brutal match… Vader is the real deal. I mean, he’s a huge guy, much bigger than me – at that time even, a hundred pounds more – and he’s a legitimate athlete. He’s got his own agenda that he’d like to promote… and that’s where the real battle comes in – and it was a battle. A lot of people talk about that to this day as one of the most physical battles, and it was.
Just because Vader’s eye was all busted up, doesn’t mean that I wasn’t beat up and bruised… he beat me up pretty good too!
Blind as I am – you know, I wear pretty thick glasses, I can see about to the end of my hand. (laughs) I of course was close enough that I could see something was wrong but until I saw him later I didn’t really (realise the extent of it). I was seeing so many stars from him hitting me that I wasn’t really concerned about his eye!” (laughs)
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<div class='spoiler_toggle'>Vader</div><div class="spoiler" style="display:none;">
“A lot of people said, ‘You’re crazy, you should have stepped out of the ring….’ But it never crossed my mind not to (finish the match).
When I was approaching the ring – Stan had entered the ring first – I took a step forward, and he pushed (Tiger) Hatori aside, took his cowbell and swung over the top of the rope and hit me in the forehead with it and busted my nose. It just shattered.
Man, I couldn’t see, my ears were ringing, and blood was pouring out…
And I stood there like that… I was well out. When I finally came to, probably about 45 seconds, I entered the ring, walked up to Stan and hit a big right, right in the ear. And that created the exchange that resulted in Stan thumbing me in the eye.
So, the big fights on, and I’m punching him, I’m drilling him, bam, bam, bam, bam!
He got back in the corner, and I was looking for the right, and forget he was a leftie – he went ‘wham, wham,’ and about the third one, my eye literally came out of the socket, hanging out. The sucker popped right out of my cheek… you couldn’t see it because the mask was on.
So I went, ‘Stan, you popped my eye out, you motherfucker!’ And I pushed it back in. Everything happened so quickly… it popped out, I shoved it back in and kept fighting.
I really didn’t think that the thumb was necessary.
I lost a great deal of sight in the right eye. And of course my nose had to be rebuilt entirely.
So you know, a lot of time off work – very costly too. The fight itself, you know, I earned pretty good money… but it ended up costing me.”
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Sources: In Your Head Online, Dropkick radio, bigvanvader.com, Wrestling’s Glory Days