Everybody Wants to Know
By TJ MADIGAN - Calgary Sun
Edge, they say you never fully recover from a serious neck injury. Do you think it shortened your career, or do you think it extended it by making you work a different style?
Edge: "You get neck surgery in this industry, it's going to shorten you career. The discs on either side of my neck are now going to be slamming off of that plate. The disc on either side will take more abuse. If I wanted to do this for another twenty years, it'll be another fusion, but once that happens, I'm done. You can only have one fusion in your body and keep doing what we do.
"I had pretty much gone eleven years without anything. It's pretty good in our industry and I was always proud of that fact. I was doing these crazy TLC matches and ladder matches. Sure, I got steel rods put in my teeth, but you work through that stuff. Tore a ligament, in my shoulder, worked through it. Tore a ligament in my knee, worked through it. The neck hit me dead centre. It was like my body was refusing to do it.
"I sprained my foot, so my mind was ready to hop right back in, but my body wasn't. My first day back, I had a cast on my hand, which limited what I could do. From there, I ruptured my groin. My whole body wasn't as flexible as it used to be. And by that point, I had already started the style I'm into now, which is physical, but smarter, but my body was still revolting on me.
"It definitely shortened my career, but that's why I have a lot of intensity. If anything, I'm more intense, but I work smarter now. I don't have to do TLC and ladder matches all the time. I can tell a story, like Ric Flair and Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels do. It took a while for guys like that to even learn it. You watch early Shawn Michaels stuff and it took a while for him to realise that telling a story is a lot easier on the body and a lot easier on the audience. Bret's one of the best storytellers ever in the business. It's not something you get right away, and for me it took a neck surgery to realise it. I'm not indestructible."
Credit: Slam! Wrestling