WWE legend The Undertaker answered his wife's SOS and scared away a shark which had been lurking in shallow waters.
Michelle McCool, a former WWE star in her own right, posted to social media that she was reading at the beach when she saw the animal and messaged The Undertaker (real name Mark Calaway) for help. He walked straight towards the shark and stared at it until it swam away.
"I was simply enjoying a book on the beach when this 'vegetation' looked a lot like a shark…..so I text hubby @undertaker," McCool wrote. Of an image she shared to social media of The Undertaker standing in shallow water, staring down the shark, she added, "Kind digging that last picture...A LOT. Guess I wasn't big enough to scare him away but you are," McCool said in a subsequent video.
McCool's social media followers informed her the animal was a "big, beautiful nurse shark" — a species considered docile and unlikely to attack unless provoked by humans. "Not that my sweet @undertaker knew that when he came out!" McCool wrote in further admiration of her husband.
While experts warn against approaching a shark in the wild, once an encounter becomes unavoidable, a person should keep eye contact with it and demonstrate power. The Undertaker may have erred in his initial response to enter the sea, but his tall pose could have worked to his advantage.
"Sharks are ambush predators," shark researcher Richard Peirce told CNN. "If you're turning around and facing it the whole time while it circles you, it's not going to be half as comfortable as if it's able to sneak up from behind."
McCool married The Undertaker in 2010 after working with him in WWE for many years. He retired from wrestling in 2020 and has since looked to carve out a persona beyond the tough guy act he made famous. But if the shark incident is any indication, Calaway will always have a bit of The Undertaker inside of him.
"I've always really been obviously a big guy, but I've always been kind of a free, fun-loving [guy]," he told the Wrap. "I like to hang out with the guys and cut up and do all that stuff. But I had to figure out how to be — after the shows, if we went out and did something, I had to figure out how to be Undertaker and still have a good time… So Undertaker kind of took over. We didn't go anywhere and I walk in and people didn't — they knew exactly, like, freakin' Undertaker just walked in.
"And obviously the guys that I trusted, my buddies that I trust, I could still have a good time with them. But everybody else, what they saw was like, 'I'm going to keep an eye on this dude because he may snatch me by my neck and choke slam me.' But yeah, Undertaker kind of took most of Mark's personality for a long time."
