“Mike jumped in the boat,” Leslie continued. “I’m working the line. We’ve got 300 feet of special kevlar line for the parasail. They’re trying to get them ready up on the beach so this girl can … go parasailing. Finally, Mike — he’s disgusted with the whole thing. We’re just about ready to go, but not quite, and Mike just takes off.”

At that moment, Leslie found himself in the water, between the boat and the parasailer. He attempted to yell for his friend, Mike, to stop the boat, but he wasn’t heard. Because of the specific way Leslie’s friend steered the boat as he took off, the female parasailer was headed directly toward Leslie.

“I turned right into her knees in my face at a 30 to 35 mile-per-hour impact,” Leslie stated. The WWE Hall of Famer described the collision as causing him to do a flip in the air, and if he had landed in any deeper water, he felt it was possible he would have drowned. “The impact had blinded me. I had optic nerve damage. It had crushed all my airways, so I couldn’t breathe. My palette broke and [had] collapsed. [I] couldn’t open my mouth.”

Leslie then described having to push up on the roof of his mouth to force an airway open and allow himself to breathe. From there, it didn’t take long for Leslie to realize that he was very seriously hurt.