Savannah Bananas star Robert Anthony Cruz wouldn’t 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 “CNN News Central” earlier this week, explained just what went wrong.
“I wiped out on live TV: a breakdown ,” he captioned a July 24 TikTok video where he recounted what happened.
“They say all press is good press, huh?” he said at the beginning of the video, while a clip of the incident played underneath him. “Well, you’ve probably seen the video. Your boy’s bouncing around the Internet like a beach ball at a Nickelback concert.”
Cruz then explained he was “running on four hours of sleep,” 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.
“I do flips all the time, while catching a ball, mind you,” he said.
“I have done tens of thousands of backflips in my life,” he continued. “I had zero reason to doubt my abilities.”
After getting the countdown while he was onstage, Cruz said he proceeded to “send the flip.”
“Next thing I know, I am on the floor, and I am rattled. I was pretty confused,” he said. “My mic pack fell out of my pocket. My shoe flew off of my foot. I don’t even know how that happened. I feel bad for then news anchors ‘cause they just sat there like, ‘OK, we’re not supposed to laugh, but, oh my gosh, that was funny.’ And they just had to carry on. So, I’m so sorry, you guys.”
He said he felt fine after getting up and thought about doing the interview before he noticed “blood dripping down from my chin and my lips.”
Cruz said he was instructed to sit down off to the side so he could get cleaned up.
“I had all of these feelings of, one, obviously, I’m embarrassed. Live television, just wiped out,” he said.
“Two, I was like, ‘How did that even happen?’ And, in hindsight, when you do a flip, you are looking for the ground while you’re rotating. So 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.”
A doctor who happened to be in the building looked him over. Cruz said he wound up getting stitches in his lip and chin.
“Thank God, aside from my damaged pride, I didn’t sustain any actually serious injuries,” he joked.
Cruz has maintained his sense of humor about the entire ordeal, while encouraging others to do the same.
“The sound makes it 10x funnier. Yes, you have my permission to laugh. Yes, I’m all good 😂😭,” he wrote, in part, while sharing video of the fall on his Instagram page.
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