Savannah Bananas star Robert Anthony Cruz wouldnโt hold it against you if you thought he slipped on a banana peel after he fell during a live appearance on national television.
Cruz, who fell while doing a backflip when he appeared on โCNN News Centralโ earlier this week, explained just what went wrong.
โI wiped out on live TV: a breakdown ,โ he captioned a July 24 TikTok video where he recounted what happened.
โThey say all press is good press, huh?โ he said at the beginning of the video, while a clip of the incident played underneath him. โWell, youโve probably seen the video. Your boyโs bouncing around the Internet like a beach ball at a Nickelback concert.โ
Cruz then explained he was โrunning on four hours of sleep,โ after he had wrapped up a baseball camp in Houston, Texas and flying to New York. When asked backstage if there were any tricks he wanted to do once he was on the air, he said he would do a backflip before carrying on with the interview. He then pointed to videos playing below him showing him successfully doing flips.
โI do flips all the time, while catching a ball, mind you,โ he said.
โI have done tens of thousands of backflips in my life,โ he continued. โI had zero reason to doubt my abilities.โ
After getting the countdown while he was onstage, Cruz said he proceeded to โsend the flip.โ
โNext thing I know, I am on the floor, and I am rattled. I was pretty confused,โ he said. โMy mic pack fell out of my pocket. My shoe flew off of my foot. I donโt even know how that happened. I feel bad for then news anchors โcause they just sat there like, โOK, weโre not supposed to laugh, but, oh my gosh, that was funny.โ And they just had to carry on. So, Iโm so sorry, you guys.โ
He said he felt fine after getting up and thought about doing the interview before he noticed โblood dripping down from my chin and my lips.โ
Cruz said he was instructed to sit down off to the side so he could get cleaned up.
โI had all of these feelings of, one, obviously, Iโm embarrassed. Live television, just wiped out,โ he said.
โTwo, I was like, โHow did that even happen?โ And, in hindsight, when you do a flip, you are looking for the ground while youโre rotating. So I remember jumping back and seeing a bright light in my face and the floor itself was very light. โI kind of just lost where I was in the air and wound up under-rotating, plus my feet slipped.โ
A doctor who happened to be in the building looked him over. Cruz said he wound up getting stitches in his lip and chin.
โThank God, aside from my damaged pride, I didnโt sustain any actually serious injuries,โ he joked.
Cruz has maintained his sense of humor about the entire ordeal, while encouraging others to do the same.
โThe sound makes it 10x funnier. Yes, you have my permission to laugh. Yes, Iโm all good ๐๐ญ,โ he wrote, in part, while sharing video of the fall on his Instagram page.
