AEW World Champion Will Ospreay appeared on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, where he discussed various topics, including whether he has come to terms with his career possibly being over due to his neck injury.
Ospreay said, “I don’t know if I had that thought, but I had the thought of I don’t think I’ll be able to wrestle the style that I’ve popularized so much, and I think that was a thing that really broke me a little bit because I just wanted to be able to perform the way that I performed and the way that I envisioned my pro wrestling, and I’d never once considered that I needed surgery. Even with everything that was going through with my neck, I never once thought it was as bad as that. I needed a double fusion. I never once thought about that, to be honest with you. But the moment that it became apparent, my first question was going to be can I still wrestle again? They said yes, but there’s going to be limitations. You can’t do this anymore; you can’t do that anymore. Do you know, the one thing that they said to me, and I talked to Cope about this because there was this kind of like, ‘Yeah, you probably can’t take any more reverse Ranas ever again.’ I just had this moment of like, what!? What do you mean I can’t take a reverse Rana? It’s like my go-to. Strike, strike, strike, something, reverse Rana, bam, everybody lay down, right? That’s kind of like my go-to, but it blew my mind because it wasn’t those moves that messed up my neck and went down my arm. It was every time I took a back bump, my arm would just shut off. So it was just kind of like, oh man, that’s so weird. And obviously, Cope would pull me to one side [and said] ‘No one cares about a reverse Rana. They care about you.’ But obviously, once my surgery was done on the rehab side, it was just kind of okay, let’s play around to see what we can do. Obviously, I went straight into the feud with Moxley and the Death Riders. There was one show that we did; I can’t remember where it was, but I think we was with the United Empire Boys, and Moxley just out of nowhere just goes take a piledriver, and I hadn’t taken one in ages. I was like, oh, this is one of the moves I wasn’t meant to be taking. Fine. Then after that, it was just kind of like, all right. When we wrestle at Dynasty, we’ll do it again, but we’ll up it a little bit more. Absolutely fine. It was just kind of like, oh, okay. I actually can do relatively all the things that I did beforehand.”
On how much pain he was in before surgery on a scale of 1-10:
“Ten, it was horrible.”
On how he was wrestling in that much pain:
“I didn’t know how bad it was. I know that sounds stupid, but I just remember the Continental Classic started, and I started getting these weird feelings in my hands, it was just kind of like pins and needles, but it just would never go away. Then, as it got more down the road, we did the Spanish fly off the cage. We’ve been doing crazy stuff. My matches haven’t been relatively house show stylized. It’s been very much go, go, go, and then it was Double or Nothing. After that, I really started noticing I was in pain. I would take a back bump, and my arm would completely shut off. It would spasm, and I couldn’t pick it up. It got to All In Texas, and I basically said, I think there is something going on in my neck, and I don’t know what it is because it just keeps shutting down. So they said that I was going to go for an MRI, and that was on Thursday. Got back, and once again, my arm every now and again would just cut out. I wouldn’t even be bumping. It would just be my head would go here and it would crap out. Then I had a phone call from Tony Schiavone, and he was just kind of like, ‘Hey, we just got your MRI results back. You’re done.’”
He continued, “What do you mean I’m done? Had to have conversations with our medical team, and they’re basically saying ‘So you do have two discs that have wrapped up into your spinal cord, bad, and we can probably do an epidural to get them out. We’re going to need to mitigate the risks in your tag match with Swerve and the Bucks to make sure nothing does happen in that one.’ But obviously, this is me as well. I ignored a lot of what the doctor said and just did what I wanted to do, and because of that, I suffered from it. Then it was only when I spoke to my surgeon, Doctor Wallace- the biggest shout-out to Doctor Wallace. He saved my career, man, saved my life. It was in Epic Universe with my kid, freshly opened Epic Universe, and I could feel his excitement. Super Nintendo World’s there. I’m excited. Then my phone rings. ‘Ah, babe, can I quickly take this phone call?’ Took it, and he told me, ‘I don’t know who told you you need an epidural. You need surgery. You’ve got stenosis.’ The narrowing of the spinal cord, spinal column. One of them. They’ve compressed so much that they’re wrapped up in there. We need to get them out.”
On his goal of getting back for Wembley Stadium:
“Yeah, that was the ultimate test. The ultimate test was to see if I can recover in time, and I remember hearing about Cena having kind of the same surgery, and I think he came back in like six months. He even said, ‘If you look at that Rumble where I did come back, I hardly did anything.’ Then I got to five months and three weeks, and they went. ‘You’re good to go.’ I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was going to be out for nine months.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
