This is why you should never sit in the front row at a pro wrestling event.

After taking to his rival’s luxury sedan with an axe, wrestler (and former NCAA and UFC champion) Brock Lesnar decided to hurl a part of the car across the stage.

Unfortunately, however, he underestimated his own strength.

Video taken by a spectator shows the door soaring through the air and straight into a young boy sitting in the audience.

"JESUS, took me a couple times to see it, but that kid got CLOCKED," Bill Neville wrote when he uploaded the video to Twitter.

Those closest to the child failed to notice what had happened but event staff reportedly took the boy backstage, where he was treated by paramedics.

While everyone knows pro wrestling is staged, Lesnar's flirtation with reality is not the first time "sports entertainment" has had real world consequences.

The now defunct Extreme Championship Wrestling was known for its especially violent approach to the sport. Terry Funk and Mick Foley were known as two of the more "extreme" performers in its history but even they were caught by surprise when the crowd interaction went too far.

One of the men called for the audience to throw him a chair with which to hit his opponent. The crowd complied, and kept complying until the performers were being showered with some very real steel furniture.

The desperate pleas of the announcers fell on deaf ears as mob mentality ruled.

And then it happened again at Total Non-Stop Action wrestling because, apparently, wrestling promoters and performers are slow learners.

As is Brock Lesnar it turns out.

Both Lesnar and his opponent in this match are real life tough guys. Lesnar is a former NCAA wrestling champion and a former UFC champion (and there's nothing fake or staged about either of those titles).

Kurt Angle famously won an Olympic gold medal for real wrestling "with a broken frickin' neck". Lesnar was lucky not to break his own neck when this flip (or shooting star press, for new players) went badly wrong during a WWE Wrestlemania match.

Sometimes the line between reality and showmanship can be blurred. When the one time pop culture phenomenon Bill Goldberg smashed up this limo, it was all part of the show. What wasn't quite as obvious was that Goldberg was mixing a real life temper tantrum with the scripted set piece.

He severely injured his arm and put himself out of action for months. As the biggest star in the now defunct WCW promotion, his brain snap has since been identified as one of the moments that led to the downfall of the company, which was once the biggest of its kind in the world.







Sometimes though there is no question that something has gone badly wrong. When WWE legend the Undertaker experienced a problem with the pyrotechnics, there was no hiding his brief panic, or the obvious burns to his skin when he climbed into the ring and completed his performance.