IMPACT X-Division champion Josh Alexander recently appeared on the Wrestling Perspective podcast where the Walking Weapon discussed a number of different topics, including revealing that he started wrestling again only six weeks after neck surgery, and how a surgeon told him he may have to retire young. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Reveals he returned to wrestling only six weeks after neck surgery:
“I remember I flew to California in September. I flew back after wrestling The Young Bucks in a cage match and had surgery the next day on my neck and we cancelled all of my bookings for five weeks. Six weeks after neck surgery, neck fusion, C4/C5, I returned and I kept wrestling and I didn’t tell anybody except Ethan Page that I had neck surgery because we thought we were so close to that contract and I was like, ‘Maybe I can work around it.’ People call me tough, I think I’m just stupid sometimes. I have this weird thing where like – it might be a combination of both – I just never wanted that to slip away because I thought I was that close.”
How a surgeon told him he might have to retire:
“After returning six weeks after neck surgery I wrestled for seven or eight months before I really had any issue and I was in California at PWG and I fell on my head again with Chris Sabin and Matt Sydal in a match and I instantly this time it was hot coffee. So I went back to the same surgeon, he scheduled an MRI. By the time he looked at it he said, ‘Yeah, you broke the level above it. What the hell are you doing?’ I told him I was wrestling and he was just like, ‘What the [expletive].’ He told me I had to retire. You can’t fuse so many levels in your neck, it’s just too dangerous to even step foot in a ring at that point he was saying.”
On rehabbing:
“So I recently became a father and decided to just retire and see if I could find something else and the only issue was when I woke up from that second surgery in July of 2015, I had no neck brace on this time. From the first surgery, I knew what to expect. I woke up and I was like, [moves head from side to side] ‘I can move my head in every direction, what’s going on?’ I had a scar across my neck, so they went in but I didn’t know and I had to wait for the surgeon. It was like two days, he finally comes in, he goes, ‘Yeah, uh, it was just complications of the first surgery, we cleaned it up, we opened up some pathways for the nerves that weren’t properly done the first time and we didn’t have to fuse the second level. So if you rehab, you can totally wrestle again.’”
On getting back into ring shape:
“First thing that went through my head is ‘Terry Funk retired four times and that’s all you hear about. Wrestlers retire and it never sticks. People are going to think I took advantage of them, the fans, wrestlers, all this stuff and this is just a ploy to make money.’ I was just like, ‘I can’t return. People are going to be pissed.’ It took six months for me to get drunk with my best friend and tell him that whole story about how I could still wrestle and he was just like, ‘Oh, you’re coming back. You’re completely miserable. What are you doing? You have to come back. Wrestling’s all you’re good at.’ Well, thanks. So I rehabbed for nine months, came back and just — I say it in every interview I’ve ever done because it’s especially true, breaking my neck and having that surgery and having to retire was the best thing that ever happen in my career because before that I had that crazy ‘I want to wrestle all the time’ thing, but I never had the drive outside of the wrestling ring; the dieting and the work ethic in the gym. It just re-wired me to be — I think I’m a complete animal now. I wake up at 3:30 in the morning to go to the gym and then go to the gym again in the afternoon. I’m on this crazy diet. It’s just the thing that motivated me to be better and make up for all the mistakes I made before that.”
(H/T and transcribed by 411 Mania)