TNA star Mustafa Ali has looked back on the moment he was dragged off stage by a horse, and how things could have been a lot worse for him on the night.
Ali teamed with Order 4 [John Skyler, Jason Hotch and Special Agent 0] at Final Resolution 2025 to take on The Rascalz [Trey Miguel, Zachary Wentz, Myron Reed, and Dezmond Xavier] in an 8 man tag team match. Although Ali looked to make his exit from the match prematurely, his rival Elijah had other ideas.
Turning up to the show on a horse, Elijah lassoed Ali and dragged him off stage, leaving the heels at a 1 man disadvantage. While the moment went off without a hitch onscreen, there were multiple elements that could have gone drastically wrong.
While speaking with Chris Van Vliet, the former X-Division Champion first spoke about the struggles in getting the spot to work. With fears that the spot would be canned entirely as TNA did not want to look bad in front of AMC executives, Ali put his job on the line and found a creative way to get around the errors:
“For some reason, it’s always tied to Elijah. Technically, it was part of a match. So back in December, we were in El Paso, an incident that is now named the Lasso in El Paso. It was The Rascalz, shout out to The Rascalz. Hope they’re doing well. We’re doing this thing where I’ve had enough with the match, I’m out of here, I’m taking the high road, and the lights go off and on, and then Elijah appears behind on a horse, and the idea is that he attacks me, ties me up, he laughs me and he pulls me out of the arena on a horse. That’s not the scary part, right? Little context, so I’ll give you twofold. There’s a story behind the story. Earlier in the day, we’re rehearsing this stunt, and this is just when TNA announced its partnership with AMC. So there’s AMC execs there and all this stuff like that. There’s a director named George who’s been with TNA for a long time, and we’re kind of walking through this rehearsal, and it is not happening. So the horse is getting scared, the lasso is becoming undone. Elijah’s not tying it right. The cameraman’s out of position. Everyone’s messing up, except for me. The director, George, says ‘Hey, I’m gonna pull the plug on this. We’re not doing the stunt. We got to come up with something.’ I’m like, ‘George, I’m telling you, we can pull this off.’ He goes, ‘You don’t understand. AMC is here, this is a bad impression. We’re not doing it.’ I don’t know what overcame me. I said, ‘George, let me do this stunt. I put my job on it. If it goes wrong, you can fire me on the spot.’ Without any hesitation, he goes, ‘Remember what you said.’ Sh*t, what did I get myself into? I went up to him [Elijah] and go, ‘Dude, we have to do it this way. There’s a guy that handles horses. Let him tie the damn lasso. No one’s looking at him. They’re looking at you. He’s 300 pounds of muscle. They’re looking at you dude, relax.’ So we had the handler do the lasso off-screen. You just don’t see it, and then it looks like Elijah did it.
Mustafa Ali Finds Out There Is Another Horse!
Continuing, Ali noted that the spot went off perfectly at Final Resolution. However, as he was being dragged through the back he saw that a second horse was in the venue. With the animal spooked, the TNA star admitted that he was just inches away from disaster as the other horse started kicking in a narrow hallway:
“So the stunt goes according to plan. I don’t get fired, but I almost die. This is why. What you guys don’t see is when the horse pulls me away, you see me screaming and all that stuff when we go down this hallway, the thing about this hallway is there’s another horse. No one told me there were two horses. The handler, because of me, was on stage doing the tying. No one is manning the horse. You guys ever see when one horse runs what another horse does? First it gets scared and starts kicking. So the hallway, it’s slim, and there’s a horse right there. So as I’m kind of going yay, I’ve done it, I turn around, there’s a horse, and the horse is kicking and screaming and jumping. I was like, All right, this is it. This is how stupid wrestlers are. My first thought is, and there’s not a cameraman to get it. So I just cover up. I say, thank you God for the good life. I just crawled up and the horse just missed me like, right here, I felt its tail almost, and I’m yelling, stop. So luckily, security came and stopped the horse. I’m a very pleasant person, despite what people hear. I got some students in the Chicago wrestling center over there. I’m very pleasant, I don’t get mad. I was on one that day, ‘Who put this horse over here?!’ There’s a whole other horse. So yeah, I’ve never had a scary experience as bad as that in the ring. It was definitely the horse. But I’m alive.”
Featured image: TNA
