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Benson Boone, please take note: Incessant backflipping on national television and/or giant stages where thousands of cameras are pointed at you carries significant risks. Chief among them, not landing said backflip, as Robert Anthony Cruz — a member of the Savannah Bananas exhibition baseball team — learned the extremely hard and painful way on CNN.
Cruz (who goes by Coach RAC) has made the backflip something of a signature. Here’s a video, for instance, of him landing a genuinely crazy backflip while simultaneously catching a pop fly during a recent Bananas game.
Yet, even the most seasoned flipper is prone to mishaps. Cruz appeared on CNN’s News Central yesterday, July 24, where he attempted a backflip, but instead of landing smoothly on his feet, he landed extremely hard on his face.
Cruz, understandably, looked pretty shaken as he pushed himself back up, remarking, “That never happens.” He later revealed on social media that he had to get several stitches in his lip and chin.
Despite the mishap, Cruz has been a good sport about the fall, quipping in a video shared online, “They say all press is good press,” and, “Your boy is bouncing around the internet like a beach ball at a Nickleback concert.” (Great Hot Rod reference. No notes.)
By way of explaining how things went wrong, Cruz said he’d gotten just four hours of sleep before his CNN appearance, and had spent the past several days running a baseball camp in Houston. And while he’s done flips in a television studio before, it’s possible the CNN set wasn’t exactly conducive to safe flipping.
“When you do a flip, you are looking for the ground while you’re rotating,” he said. “I remember jumping back and seeing a bright light in my face, and the floor itself was very light. I kind of just lost where I was in the air and wound up under-rotating. Plus, my feet slipped. Also, I gotta say, my arms flailing — I have no idea why it was like that.”
At the end of the clip, Cruz said, “Thank God, aside from my damaged pride, I didn’t sustain actually serious injuries. One thing I will say, the dad lore is gonna go crazy.”
