Jake “The Snake” Roberts was known to bring a giant snake with him to the ring and place them on his opponents in victory.
The WWE Hall Of Famer recalled during the DDP Snake Pit Podcast about how things didn’t go according to plan with a snake when he wrestled Ricky Steamboat.
“Ricky Steamboat had to pull one off of me in Indianapolis that choked me out in the match. I collapsed, went down, and Steamboat’s seeing that the snake was around my throat and that I was turning and he knew to unwind the snake. You can’t break the snake’s grip because what happens when you lay across their scales like this, their scales interlock You can’t break that lock. So you have to either get the head or the tail and unravel them. Well, Steamboat unravelled it then let go because Steamboat is afraid of snakes too.
“As I come to, the snake is going into the fourth row and the tail, luckily, is still in the ring. And I lunge and grab the tail and I whip it all back in. It’s about a 17 footer. Because the people were starting the red sea movement where they’re all running and screaming. It was pretty incredible.
“We went back to Indianapolis about three months later. As soon as I got there, I thought I was fixing to be arrested because the police were coming and the building manager and I’m like, ‘What have I done?’ They’re like, ‘Did you bring the same snake?’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ ‘Because, man, everyone called wanting to know if it’s the same snake because they want to watch that son-of-a-b*tch kill you’. I’m like, ‘Oh I love my fans’.”
H/T to Wrestling Inc for the transcription