Many moons ago, you used to be able to judge someone based solely off the quality of their teeth. If you walked past someone in the street and they gave you a smile, chances are that if they had a full set of pearly whites, you would be more inclined to talk to them and see them as approachable. On the other hand, if someone smiled at you and their mouth looked like a vandalized cemetery, you might shoot them a look that read “please don’t approach me, I’m scared.”
Thankfully, those days are gone, and if you ever judged a WWE Superstar based solely off of their dental hygiene, you might miss out on becoming a fan of some of the best professional wrestlers on the planet. Thanks to the big money contracts that WWE Superstars are on these days, virtually everyone on the roster has a million dollar smile, just look at Roman Reigns from WrestleMania 41 as his teeth were so white for his match that they could have been counted as a fourth participant in the Triple Threat main event of night one. However, with wrestling being such a physical business, some of those smiles can become crooked and damaged.
That is what we are here to talk about today. The times in which a WWE Superstar has walked in to a ring with a nice big smile on their face, and left not knowing if they will ever be able to show their teeth in a picture ever again. Sometimes when you see a wrestler get punched in the face, the commentary team will sell it by saying something like “I think that might have been a tooth I saw fly across the ring there,” and these are the occasions where teeth did in fact go flying. So sit back, relax, make sure you’ve got your next dentist appointment lined up, and join us on a journey through the WWE archives, as we look back on the times where wrestlers lost their teeth in a WWE ring.
Cesaro
If you watch Claudio Castagnoli compete for All Elite Wrestling today, you’ll notice that he wears a mouthguard for all of his matches. For newer fans, this small detail might just be something that plays in to the fact that he started life in AEW as a member of the Blackpool Combat Club, a faction where you likely needed a mouthguard in order to survive their sparring sessions. However, Castagnoli wears a mouthguard because of what happened to him at WWE No Mercy 2017.
By the fall of 2017, the man WWE fans knew as Cesaro had firmly established himself as a part of the midcard on “WWE Raw.” While many fans always thought that he should be pushed further up the card, Cesaro always made sure to stand out in whatever position he was put in, and after a very physical feud with Sheamus in 2016, Cesaro joined forces with the Irishman to form The Bar, a duo that dominated the “Raw” tag team division. They won the WWE Raw Tag Team Championships on two occasions, with their second reign being ended by the newly reformed team of Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose at SummerSlam 2017.
Naturally, The Bar wanted a rematch after losing their crowns, and No Mercy would be the location of said rematch. During the match, Cesaro was catapulted into the corner by Ambrose, a move where “The Swiss Superman” was meant to land on the turnbuckle, but given that we’re talking about it on this list, that’s not what happened. Cesaro jumped too far when being released and ended up landing mouth-first on top of the ring post, with his teeth absorbing the impact in grotesque fashion. Cesaro’s two front teeth were pushed into his gums, and while he did end up finishing the match, he required surgery to get his mouth fixed when he arrived backstage.
Cesaro would receive three stitches in his bottom lip on the night, and thanks to the fact that No Mercy was taking place in the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, WWE put Cesaro in contact with the doctor for the Los Angeles Kings NHL team. After getting his teeth fixed, Cesaro was made to wear braces for two years which he was able to cover up thanks to his trusty mouthguard, and in August 2019, Cesaro got his braces removed, an occasion he celebrated by eating some of his favorite fruits that he couldn’t eat properly due to said braces.
Jeff Hardy
Amazingly, WWE No Mercy 2017 wasn’t the only time that The Bar were involved in a teeth related injury on pay-per-view that year. If anything, you could argue that Cesaro having his two front teeth forcibly moved four millimeters closer to his brain was actually karma for what happened to Jeff Hardy just a few months earlier.
After taking TNA, ROH, and the rest of the wrestling world by storm with their “Broken Universe,” Matt and Jeff Hardy were back in WWE in 2017, making their surprise return to the company at WrestleMania 33. On that night, The Hardy Boyz captured the WWE Raw Tag Team Championships in a Fatal Four Way Ladder match that featured Enzo and Cass, The Club, and The Bar, leading to a very busy month for the new champions as they would defend their newly won titles against the team who walked into WrestleMania 33, The Club, on the following night’s episode of “WWE Raw.”
Then came their feud with The Bar, which officially kicked off at the Payback pay-per-view at the end of the month, and it was here where “The Charismatic Enigma” was given a rough welcome back present from “The Celtic Warrior.” At one point in the match where Jeff was trying to tag in his brother, Sheamus landed a stiff kick right to the face, causing Jeff to immediately drop to the canvas in pain. When the replay was shown, a small white dot could be seen flying across the screen, which turned out to be one of Hardy’s teeth. Unlike Cesaro who had his teeth get pushed into his gums, Jeff’s tooth ended up in the referee’s pocket so that it wouldn’t get lodged in someone’s back throughout the match.
The Hardy Boyz would retain the titles on the night, and Jeff would be looked at by the medical team backstage after the match. Jeff was given his tooth back and was even told to keep hold of it as a dentist might be able to reattach it through a simple procedure, and despite feeling some pain in the teeth surrounding the gap in his mouth, only the one tooth ended up leaving Hardy’s mouth. A few days later, Hardy’s problem would be fixed as he was given a brand new tooth, but he and his brother’s problems with The Bar would only grow in the weeks and months after as Sheamus and Cesaro would dethrone The Hardy Boyz in a Steel Cage match at Extreme Rules in May 2017.
Asuka
It’s bad enough having your smile altered in front of thousands of fans in a packed arena to sympathize with you, but it’s even worse when the only audience that you have in the arena is a wall of computer screens with people’s faces on them.
The COVD-19 pandemic was a dark time for professional wrestling as the whole world tried to adapt to a new way of living where you weren’t supposed to go within six feet of another person. That would have been very difficult for wrestling, and as a result, WWE was deemed an “essential business” in the state of Florida, and continued to produce weekly shows as a result. Over time, WWE would move from the Performance Center in Orlando where the crowd was made up of other wrestlers and anyone who was hanging around the PC that day, to the “Thunderdome,” a state of the art arena set up in three different venues across a 12 month period, and it was in the “Thunderdome” where Asuka faced a different problem to the one the entire world had been deal with, Shayna Baszler’s right boot.
On the February 22, 2021 edition of “WWE Raw,” Asuka teamed up with Charlotte Flair to take on the team of Baszler and Nia Jax, and during the match, Asuka had Jax in an armbar and was hoping Jax would submit. Baszler would then get into the ring, think about the best way to break up the submission, before kicking Asuka in the face as hard as she could. Almost immediately you could see pain on Asuka’s face and for good reason, as the force of the kick had caused one of her teeth to fly out of her mouth. Jax and Baszler would rub salt in the literal wound in Asuka’s mouth by defeating Flair and the then WWE Raw Women’s Champion.
The problem with Asuka’s injury was that the kick didn’t knock the whole tooth out of her mouth. Instead, the kick had broken the tooth in half, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic making going to the dentist a lot more challenging than it would usually be, “The Empress of Tomorrow” would have to see three different dentists before any sort of progress could be made. Asuka revealed on Xavier Woods’ YouTube channel “UpUpDownDown” that because her tooth was broken, the root was still in her gum, and that she would be able to get a fixed replacement, but that she would have to wait six months before any sort of procedure could happen. Thankfully for Asuka, the world would properly open up in the summer of 2021, she would get her new tooth, and would get her revenge on Baszler on an episode of “Raw” in March.
Natalya
For as many injuries happen on live TV, just as many end up happening at non-televised live events and in dark matches. Seth Rollins famously blew his knee out in 2015 at a house show in Dublin, Ireland, forcing him to vacate the WWE World Championship in the process. Tyson Kidd had his wrestling career ended in a dark match against Samoa Joe that same year, and Kidd’s wife, Natalya, had to take an emergency trip to the dentist when her two front teeth were knocked clean out of her head.
By the fall of 2016, Natalya was having something of a career resurgence in WWE, and was one of the many Superstars who benefited massively from the company once again taking the brand split seriously. She was drafted to “WWE SmackDown Live” and became one of the most reliable hands on the show, culminating in her winning the WWE SmackDown Women’s Championship at SummerSlam 2017. However, there were some bumps in the road, and one of those bumps was a match at a WWE live event in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 1, 2016.
Natalya teamed up with Alexa Bliss and Carmella to take on Becky Lynch and Nikki Bella in a Handicap match, and at some point in the match, Natalya took a blow to the face that saw her two front teeth take a trip up the Las Vegas strip. As soon as the match was over, Natalya was rushed to an emergency dentist to fix her smile, where she not only saw some of the top dentists in the country, but she also got help from her good friend and former WWE announcer Renee Young (now Renee Paquette in AEW) who actually doubled as a dental assistant, making the procedure a lot easier than Natalya might have expected.
After spending a little extra time in Nevada, Natalya left Sin City with a fresh set of pearly whites, and was even able to make it to WWE’s next house show the very next night in Ontario, California, and would even wrestle on “WWE Main Event” on October 4. With that said, she would remain off of “SmackDown Live” until the end of the month, but would once again be defeated by Bella once she made her return.
Mick Foley
This is the most famous case of someone losing their teeth in a WWE ring and it’s not even close. If you take a look at the picture of Mick Foley above and look closely, you’ll be able to see a white dot situated in his left nostril. That isn’t something that’s popped up after the photo was proceeded, or a rogue piece of fabric that had somehow ripped itself off of his white shirt, that is one of Foley’s teeth.
The Hell in a Cell match between Mick Foley and The Undertaker is one of the most iconic matches in wrestling history and has transcended pop culture in the near three decades since it took place. The visual of Foley’s Mankind character both learning and failing to fly in real time is engrained into the minds of everyone who saw the match live, as well as the people who have gone back to watch and analyze it, and as we all know by now, Foley suffered some horrific injuries after being thrown off of, and through the Hell in a Cell structure.
As expected, Foley suffered a massive concussion from the two most famous bumps in the match, while also suffering internal bleeding and bruised ribs. He dislocated both his shoulder and his jaw, and received various puncture wounds thanks to the thousands of thumbtacks that were introduced halfway through the match. However, there was one puncture wound that wasn’t visible to the audience, but it was easily the most disgusting of all. Foley had several of his teeth knocked out thanks to the impact of the two falls, but one of his teeth decided that it didn’t want to leave Foley’s mouth, and decided to take a trip through the roof of his mouth and into his nose. There is an iconic shot of Foley smiling into the camera, mouth leaking blood, and a tooth sticking out of his nose, something that is almost as memorable as the bumps he took in the match.
When he got to the back, Foley received a standing ovation from the rest of the locker room, including Vince McMahon who might have appreciated what Foley did to himself on that night, but asked him to never do anything like that ever again. The match obviously took its toll on the “Hardcore Legend” as he would retire from full-time wrestling just two years later, and has been very open about how much pain he still feels to this day. As for his teeth, Foley would actually embrace the gaps in his mouth and not have them fixed as it is always a reminder, whenever he looks in the mirror, of that legendary night.
