Korderas recalled struggling to calm down after the incident, and was eventually made to get checked out in the same hospital that had admitted Hart, where he was informed that the former Intercontinental, European, and tag team champion had passed away. Korderas then got on the phone with his then-fiancee, considering whether he should come home or continue to WWE’s next stop.

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“We ended up going to St. Louis the next day for ‘Raw,’ and I still don’t remember getting there, if that makes any sense,” he said. “I don’t remember driving, flying from Kansas City to St. Louis. It was just that surreal.”

Upon arriving at “Raw,” Korderas was checked on by locker room luminaries like The Undertaker and Triple H, but it was Jim Ross — WWE’s head of talent relations at the time — who offered to fly him home.

“I just told him, ‘JR, you know what? I don’t know if this sounds weird to you, but I feel I need to be here with everybody, because we’re all going through the same thing,'” Korderas said.

It was Ross’ partner on commentary, Jerry Lawler, who informed Korderas that he’d come very close to going through something very different.

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“He sat me down and said, ‘Listen, I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but his fall, I saw, I witnessed the last 15, 20 feet of his fall.’ He had just caught him out of the corner of his eye, and his first reaction is, ‘Oh my god, he’s going to fall on the referee.’ And apparently that’s what I felt brush by my side. And when he told me that, again, I just lost it. I couldn’t hold it in. And he consoled me as best he could. And again, they said, you know, if you want to go home. I said no, I think I need to be here with everybody, because like I said, we’re all going through this.”