As noted, Erik of The War Raiders appeared on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling and WWE.
In addition to the highlights we published from the interview this morning, the WWE veteran also spoke about his near-death motorcycle accident, on how he almost didn’t return to WWE after his neck injury and more.
Featured below are some additional excerpts from the discussion where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On his near-fatal motorcycle accident: “So in 2014 actually, just after War Machine started rolling. He [Ivar] and I spent 11 or 12 years each not making any money in wrestling, basically both giving up on making wrestling our career. We get offered Ring of Honor contracts. We start wrestling. Everything’s starting to go good. Then like I had done every day for two years, I got on my motorcycle, went to the gym, left the gym on my way to get something to eat. A girl was texting at a stop sign and she just pulled out right in front of my motorcycle. So I was going about 55 miles an hour, and she was maybe 30 feet in front of me. I hadn’t even had the conscious decision to brake, whether I was going to try to brake and turn to miss her or lay my bike down, I just kind of said, Oh! I didn’t even get the full word out of my mouth, so I wasn’t even censoring myself, and I smashed into the back of her car. So instead of hitting the hood, I had turned and jerked the wheel and I hit the back seat. So because I had torqued the handlebars like this, I broke my left thumb. I shattered everything above my left arm to my elbow to my shoulder. Then I went up over my handlebars. I punched out her rear window with my face, lacerated above my eye, broke my nose, but I didn’t break the cartilage. I broke the bone, the skull, hit my knee, then I stood up, and my arm was like wiggling. The girl comes out of the car, and she’s crying. She’s like, ‘Do you need me to call the ambulance?’ And I was like, Yes, please. Then the ambulance shows up and they pull up across the street or across the intersection.”
On if he was still standing at this point: “Yeah, I was. I had sat down at that point, and I just stood up off the curb, and I started walking to the ambulance. I remember that I saw the ambulance and the paramedic grabbed a body bag out of the back, because they just assumed from the call that I was dead. I walked over and there’s literally a body bag on the ground. I’m like full Walking Dead, right? Because my whole face is like gnarled up with blood and stuff and the paramedic looks at me, and he’s like, ‘Sir, you’re not supposed to be walking.’ I’m sure I was in shock at this point, and I was like, ‘Do you want me to go sit back down?’ He said, ‘No, no, no, you’re already over here. I just want to stabilize your neck before you do anything else.’ I was like, okay. He’s like, ‘Unless you want to walk to the hospital.’ I was like, ‘How far is the hospital?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s about three miles.’ I was like, ‘No, I’ll take the ride.’ I’m sure he was teasing me at that point, but I was in so much shock that I didn’t know what was going on. Then everybody I talked to after that, the emergency room docs, the surgeon, all the doctors were basically like people don’t typically live, because I wasn’t wearing a helmet. We’ve talked back and forth on whether or not that actually saved my life or not, and I’m not advocating that you shouldn’t wear a helmet on a bike. I’m just saying mine, one in a million chance, because I hit the window with my head and there’s a chance if I was wearing a helmet it would have been bigger, and I could have hit the cross guard over the top of the car. That might have snapped my neck. It might not have, I don’t know. I know that my dad has always told me that I give my guardian angel the hardest time, and I almost outran him that day. But, yeah, he was looking out. There was a reason that I survived that, and a reason that I was there. So then the doctors were like, ‘Yeah, dude, you should be dead. You should have died in the physics of this accident, usually this is a fatal accident. There’s no way you’re going to wrestle again, your arm is completely shattered. It’s destroyed. Everything from the elbow to shoulder is just destroyed, you’re going to be lucky to lift weights.’ Six months later I was wrestling again. I had two plates, 18 pins and screws and, I don’t know, six or seven hour surgery, putting my arm back together.”
On possibly not returning after his recent neck injury: “Yeah, absolutely. So I got in a freak accident, I landed a suplex, I got dropped directly on my head, just one of those things. I think we kind of say it without really thinking about it that in wrestling any match could be our last, or any move could be our last, or whatever. We kind of don’t think about the weight of that. I was on a live event, non-televised, just a match that we don’t really think about or we take for granted. Doing a move, taking a suplex that I had taken 1000s of times in my career. Didn’t think once about it. For whatever reason, on that day, I over-rotated and landed directly in my head. When it happened, I knew I was hurt, but I didn’t know how bad I was hurt. I thought it was something that was in my trap, and everything kind of locked up. So I was treating it muscular. It got worse. We got MRIs, saw there was herniation in the disc. I kept wrestling, because I was like, well we can just keep treating this with PT. I was talking with doctors. I was doing PT like 3, 4, 5, times a week. I was getting dry needling, scraping, everything, trying to mitigate all the stuff I was doing. I was doing electric therapy and stuff like that, trying to stimulate the nerves, trying to doing everything I could to avoid surgery. But at the same time, I was wrestling every single week, I didn’t miss a match. Then I took another bad fall, just got tumbled up going over the ropes one time and it actually didn’t even hit my neck. I hit my elbow on the apron on the way over, and then three days later, my tricep disappeared, my right lat shrank half in size, and then my right pec flattened within days. I came in, and I was terrified. So I came into work that week, and we were scheduled for a match, actually against New Day. Ironically enough, we were scheduled to wrestle The New Day. I sat down with medical, I sat down with Triple H and everybody, the consensus was, ‘Hey, you’re going to Birmingham tomorrow. You’re not flying home, cancel plans. We’re flying you from TV to Birmingham.’ I saw Dr Cordover. We did try a nerve block thing, because he was like, hey, maybe we can reverse some of this. So we tried that before cutting and then that didn’t have the effect that anyone wanted. So we did neck surgery but it was immediate, it was fast. It was like, bang, bang, bang.”
On how scary that sounds: “It was [scary]. They’re going through the front now. So it’s ACDF surgery. It’s at level six, seven. Ivar’s got two levels. So his is actually the one above and mine, but our symptoms are totally different, even down to the fingers, our nerve pathway. The way that my nerve pathway was affected was totally different than his. So it’s funny that we both have surgically repaired necks, but our injuries couldn’t be more separate. But yeah, I’ve always been a fast healer. After the motorcycle wreck I was back in six months, so in my brain I was like, I’ll be back in six months. I’ve done this before, it’s fine. Six months came, I went for the scan, still didn’t have full fusion, seven months no fusion, eight months no fusion, nine months no fusion. Now I’m getting scared. What happens if this doesn’t fully fuse? What is life without wrestling? How does this go on? Then, thank God, finally it did fuse. We showed full fusion, I was able to start training again, get back really quickly. But then it ended up being 13 months, I think, from surgery that I was out. There were definitely some times of this might be the end. So I was thinking, I’m texting with Ivar, and talking to my wife every day, how do we go from here? What happens now? So it’s sobering to be struck there. So, then having the motorcycle wreck, then having the neck surgery. There’s all of this like Hey, dude, don’t take anything for granted. Not a single flight, not a single match, not a single move, not a single day.”
On The Viking Experience: “Our first day on the main roster. We had never actually physically met Vince McMahon, but we went and stood outside his office to go and plead our case. Because I was ringside, this is fun. I was ringside, and I see our music starts playing, and it’s ‘The War Raiders’ up on the screen, and then the logo changes, and ‘Berserkerz’ comes up. Now I’m looking like, oh man. Then that goes away, and ‘The Viking Experience’ comes up. I look and I’m like, Oh no! So I walk up and Hunter was actually ringside, he’s texting, and I walk up to him and I was like, ‘Hey, dude, is this a rib?’ He just shakes his head and goes, ‘I wish.’ I’m like, ‘What do we do?’ He’s like, ‘Well, you gotta go talk to Vince.’ All right, cool. So Ivar’s plane was late, he gets to the building, I tell him, ‘We got to go talk to Vince. This is bad.’ So we go get in line, we stand, we make our case. Said, Viking Experience sounds like a Disney ride, it sounds something like a small world, the tea cups and all that stuff. The Viking Experience, bring your kids, right? So, we pitched that case, and Vince was like, ‘Well, that makes sense, but we don’t have time to get that through legal.’ Because we asked to be Viking Raiders because we heard, a little birdie told us, when we changed from War Machine to War Raiders they were really stuck on Raiders. So all of the names had Raiders in them. This time, Vince was really stuck on us being Vikings. He loved Vikings. Little known fact, Vince was a big fan of the history show Vikings, which is probably why we got called up in the first place, because he was like, ‘Hey, we got Vikings on TV? Bring them up!’ So he wanted us to be the Viking something, right? And the problem is, Vikings are a very popular thing in culture right now. So nothing could get past legal, nothing could get trademarked, nothing could get whatever. Viking Experience was shockingly free, because no one wanted to be that, including us. So we asked to be Viking Raiders. By this point, it’s like, 7:30. The show’s going on at 8. He was like, ‘Well, we can’t get this cleared through legal at this point. So what we’ll do is, you’ll be the Viking Experience today, and if we really don’t like it, then we’ll be Viking Raiders next week. No press is bad press. So worst case scenario, people will talk. They’ll be talking about you.’ So we’re like, okay, and as we’re leaving the office, kind of in an afterthought, he goes, ‘Oh and by the way, one of you is Ivar, and one of you is Erik, I don’t care who.’ We just walked out. I looked and we were maybe two steps outside of his office, Ivar grabs my arm for real, and he’s like, ‘Please don’t make me be Erik. My brother’s name is Erik.’ The bully in my brain for like, three seconds, I was like man, I really should be mean. No, okay, fine, you could be Ivar. But it was close to us being the other way. I was like I don’t know how they came up with these names. Someone in creative might have just Googled famous Viking names or something. Because I did that afterwards, trying to figure out where they come up with these names. The first one was Erik the Red. Then it was Ivar the Boneless. I was like, Oh, cool. So it’s literally just Erik, Ivar. ‘You guys are Vikings?’ Eric and Ivar.”
