Adam Copeland achieved everything there was to achieve in WWE, which is why he decided to try AEW.
The Rated R Superstar spoke on this topic during a recent interview with Shakiel Mahjouri of CBS Sports. The former Edge began by reflecting on his final WWE match against Sheamus, which took place in his hometown of Toronto. Copeland says that it will be a night that he will never forget.
I mean, honestly, at that stage where I was at, I truly felt like, ‘Okay, this is probably my last time in Toronto.’ A lot of the time I wear my heart on my sleeve out there and I’m unfiltered. So you’re getting Adam Copeland and you’re getting his thoughts at that time. Now, thoughts can always change and things like that. As I got closer to the end of the deal, retirement was a very, very real option. It was not off the table. This was not just, ‘I’m going there.’ I really sat with the idea of retirement because I truly thought like, ‘Man, WWE gave me that night. I don’t know how that gets topped.’ And that’s still in my brain. But I guess now it’s like, ‘Okay, how can I try and top it in this new environment.’ Honestly, that Toronto show was a send-off of that character and it was the perfect way for that character to go out. Wrestling a guy that I’ve never wrestled that I always wanted to. It was just so much fun in there. That night, I’ll never forget it. I’ll always have that night with me. I told Sheamus that too. That will be one of the most special nights in my career, always. It truly felt as that night was going on and the march was going and the feeling during the match, the feeling after the match, I just truly felt like, I don’t think I’m going to stop that feeling.
Copeland then addresses the subject of leaving WWE, where he explains that he accomplished pretty much everything he could have there and wanted to try something different. He adds that WWE didn’t have many plans for him going forward anyway.
I kind of got the sense there wasn’t really a plan. I get it because what else do we do? What else is there to do? And after 25 years I’ve literally done everything there. So what do we do? It wasn’t anybody’s fault… I was coming up against creative walls too. I was having a hard time coming up with ideas and that’s not usually the case. I think they were too. There was also the conundrum that I was contracted for 10 matches a year. I offered to do more, but to their point it wouldn’t feel quite as special, which I understood too. So there was a weird kind of conundrum, right? It just felt like neither one of us really had any ideas and that’s never been the case before. So when you look at that and then I look at my best friend over there having the time of his life, at a certain point, once I thought, ‘You know what, I still have a window here where I can do this and I don’t feel like I’m maximizing that.’ I think that was really what it boiled down to. I want to try and maximize what I still have left. If that’s one year, if that’s two years, I want to do it as much as I can while I still feel like I can. I know that’s going to be hard and I know that’s going to take a lot of work physically. I know there’s a different fallout now, but I know all of those things and I really just want to weigh the glory of this thing as much as I can.
Elsewhere in the interview, Copeland revealed when he started speaking with AEW and how fast the decision was made for him to join the roster. You can read about that here.
