AEW star Ortiz recently appeared on the Johnny I Pro Show, where he discussed several topics, including his surgery last year. Ortiz suffered a torn pectoral muscle in January 2024 after executing a clothesline during a match on Collision. Although the initial surgery was successful, complications arose afterward, leading to the discovery of a hematoma under his arm, which required a second surgery.
Ortiz said, “And honestly, I haven’t quit wrestling because of them (Eddie Kingston, Homicide & Low Ki), to be honest. During my injury, of course there’s that moment that you’re like, ‘What am I doing? I was kind of wasting away, I’m sitting there, I couldn’t move for like three to four months. I couldn’t do anything, and I actually never told this story before so, maybe three weeks after my surgery, ‘I think I can do legs.’ Like, let me do some leg presses or something like that. I’ll take it easy in the gym, and I don’t know if it was that or if it was something else, but then, I had a hematoma. So it was like a tennis ball that was under my arm. I’ll show you a picture later. It’s pretty gnarly. So, that happened like two or three weeks after the surgery and then I had to go in for a second surgery. So I was just, like, depressed. I went mostly my whole life with ever avoiding the hospital. Unreal that I made it 16-plus years without a serious injury and never had to stop wrestling. So when I had to get two surgeries within less than a month span, and then I was just like I can’t do anything for a couple of months. I have to just sit there and I was really contemplating, ‘Is this something I wanna continue doing?’ You know what I mean? And of course, you go through those questions, there’s self-doubt, I’m no longer in my tag team so, I definitely went to a low moment. That was a low moment for me. But then, speaking of mentors, Eddie Kingston told me this a long time ago and it always sticks with me, right? Everything is energy. You can control what you do with that energy. Yes, bad things and negative things are happening to you, but what are you gonna do? You’re gonna sit there and just kind of sulk about it and just let it affect you? Or are you gonna use that to make yourself work harder? To have that chip on your shoulder? And that’s where I’ve come at mentally. After having that low moment, I was like, okay, I’ve felt my feelings, I’m over it, but it’s time to man up. Let’s go. It’ll pass and now, honestly, if I didn’t go through that low moment, I don’t think I’d be mentally — and I’m in the best shape of my life right now… Only because now I’m just driven and I have a singular purpose and a singular goal. I wanna do so much volume, so much work that it is impossible that I don’t achieve the heights that I want. It’s impossible. So that’s just my only goal. Just keep doing volume, keep hammering it out, keeping my boots to the ground and just do it and my goal, now, ultimately is opening up the school because, really, honestly, that’s where I wanna transition into wrestling. I just wanna train people. I just wanna have badass students, to then go on the independents, and make names for themselves.”
Ortiz finally returned to the ring in March, but he has yet to return to AEW.
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(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
