Walton Goggins tells the story of losing his front teeth twice

Over the years, Walton Goggins has perfected the evil smile, whether it was in Justified, The Hateful Eight, or now on Vice Principals, but as a child he had quite a different smile.

On Monday, the actor was on Conan, where he recalled an incident in his childhood, which caused him to have his two front teeth knocked out. “I showed up late to baseball practice in 5th grade, and I had to take a lap and I was running to centerfield and all I heard was ‘Walton,’” shared Goggins. “And I turn around and I caught a baseball right in my mouth and literally my two front teeth were on the ground next to me.”

Having your teeth knocked out as a child is traumatic enough, but the story somehow got even more painful for Goggins. Modern medicine wasn’t quite as evolved in 1979 as it is now, so he soon found out that even medical professionals weren’t sure how to help.

“No one knew what to do, like literally no one knew,” he recalls. “Everybody kind of freaked out and my mother’s boyfriend at the time picked them up, took me to the emergency room. And the only thing I remember from the whole experience was the doctor in the ER talking to a dentist on the phone, saying, ‘Yeah, I have his two teeth. No, they’re here. I have them in my hand. No, no they’re not in his mouth. Oh, I have to put them back in his gums right now?’ And they shoved them up with no novacane.”

While the story sounds painful and Goggins says it was, it did work — at least temporarily. “They healed and the roots connected,” said Goggins. “And everything was fine until a year and a half later, I dove off into the shallow end of a pool and hit the bottom and knocked them out again.”

Watch the video above.