Edge discusses retiring and returning, Wrestlemania and retiring again
WrestleMania 39: Edge talks about his long road to recovery and return to the ring
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – Everyone loves a good comeback story.
In 2020, Canadian-born World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Famer Adam Copeland, better known as Edge, gave professional wrestling its greatest comeback story of all time.
There have been some incredible comebacks in the company’s storied history: Shawn Michaels returning four years after back surgery, or Bryan Danielson’s return after more than two years on the sidelines recovering from neck surgery. But in those instances, the door was left open to their eventual returns.
Such was not the case for Edge, a 31-time champion who was at the time among the top names in WWE when he walked to the ring on April 11, 2011, still in his mid-30s, and abruptly announced his retirement from wrestling, the result of spine and neck injuries that threatened more than his career, but his quality of life.
That night, the wrestling world stood still, shocked over the end of an iconic era.
Looking back on that time now, the now 49-year-old Edge said it wasn’t a dark time in his life, rather it was simply the situation he was dealt at that time.
“I just realized I had to wrap my mind around the idea that this was done and I was given no choice,” he said in an interview at a hotel in Los Angeles, days before he faces Finn Balor in a Hell in a Cell match at WrestleMania 39 in Hollywood. “When you’re given no choice, in a strange way it almost makes it easier because you’re told you can’t do this. Well, if I can’t do it, then the choice is being taken out of your hands.”
Unlike now, as he approaches 50 years of age, there was no debating back then about whether he had another good year left in him.
“That’s what I’m encountering now and it is more difficult,” he admitted in the midst of his once unthinkable return.
Watching Edge talk about that time in his life, even now it’s apparent he doesn’t spend much time in that era, even in his own mind. These days, he wears a smile that is topped only by the spark in his eyes and the richness in his life, thanks to his wife, fellow WWE Hall of Famer Beth Phoenix, and their two daughters.
When pressed to discuss the time before his nearly decade-long retirement, Edge concedes that the abruptness of what he thought to be the end of his wrestling career was jarring, but he quickly pointed out that his neck wasn’t the only part of him that was worn out.
“I was really tired and really sore,” he said. “It was the travel, and the punishment. And if I look back during that run, I was a heel champion, I was working (Dave) Batista and John Cena and The Undertaker and Kane and Big Show and it’s like, who was taking the bumps?”
In other words, even if his health hadn’t have forced him out, he was in desperate need of some time away.
“I was ready for a break. I wasn’t ready to retire though,” he said, but fate had other plans. “This is what you have in front of you, so you’d better wrap your mind around it, because it’s now the reality,” he recalled.
If anything, he said, he faced some serious culture shock.
“The doctors all told me: this can’t happen, this won’t happen,” he said of a comeback, to which he remembers telling himself ‘OK if it can’t and it won’t, then I need to just come to grips and come to terms with what life is now.’ At that point, I was single, didn’t have kids, I didn’t have another career in mind or anything.”
In one sense, it was a little daunting, but in the other, it was a blank slate.
“It was kind of exciting in a way, too, because it’s like, ‘OK, it’s wide open. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll do something because I have to tap that creative vein.”
What he did know, however, was that it was time to step away from his first love, the wrestling business. Save for a sporadic appearance here and there over the years, Edge was mostly absent from the career he once dominated.
“Over the nine years, wrestling went away for me,” he said. “A lot of that was a conscious decision,” he said, conceding that he felt he had no other choice but to put it behind him. “When you’re told you can’t do it, it’s like ‘Hmm, well that feels like it might be painful to continue to watch something that I can’t do that I love. It’s hard to go back to being just purely a fan. You’re going to watch it a different way, you’re going to maybe not enjoy it and when it’s taken away from you like that …”
Edge rode off into the sunset, and Copeland re-emerged, finding love, a passion for acting and starting a family. Wrestling would nip at his heels now and again in that time, with sporadic WWE appearances, an induction into the WWE Hall of Fame and being honoured by the Cauliflower Alley Club, but largely, Edge was gone, immortalized in the history books. Copeland, however, found ways to keep the creative side of his brain stimulated.
“The acting kind of falling in my lap was pretty key,” he said. “I think that helped to fill that void.”
Newfound love filled Copeland’s heart. After marrying former WWE co-worker Phoenix, the two decided to start a family.
“When Beth and I started talking about having kids, then your entire everything changes,” Edge said. “It all changes and everything else seems very miniscule in comparison to being a parent and being a present father and being involved and all of those things. The acting became a side gig to just being a dad. And that’s still the case. Everything I do it, it takes a backseat to being a dad. (The WWE), acting, it’s a juggling act but it all falls second place to being a dad to my two girls.”
That neck injury changed the trajectory of Copeland’s life, for the better.
“When I look at those nine years I was retired, my life got so much richer, so much more full without wrestling eating up all of it,” he said, adding he could never have become a parent had he remained in WWE. “Where I was at, the level at which I was doing it, the grind and the schedule, it has to be that way,” he said. “It’s just the nature of the beast. And there’s no way around it. There wasn’t time to have a family. There wasn’t time to meet the proper person to have the family with. I can look back and say that now and realize that. But in being retired, it gave me the time to finally stop and look at those things that will be around way after what people think you were as a pro wrestler.”
And had Edge’s wrestling story finished for good on April 11, 2011, the man himself says now that he would have been at peace with it. He found love, family and a passion for acting, having starred in recurring roles on TV series’ Haven and Vikings, among other projects.
In 2012, he underwent a second neck surgery, the earlier one having previously extended his wrestling career. But something changed following the second procedure.
“I felt better,” Edge said. “I woke up without a headache, which was really nice.” It had been a decade, he said, since he’d known what it was like to live without head pain.
“Beth will remind me that we’d be out for like two hours of errands and I’d have to go get flat because my head would just be pounding,” he said. “If I’d look over my shoulder, it would feel like an elastic band snapped in my head,” he described, turning his head as he spoke. “I called it a hot water bottle because it would feel like someone just dropped hot water inside your skull and it would run down and run down your arm. As humans, we tend to gloss over that stuff because you don’t want to remember it, so you just forget it. But after the second neck surgery, I woke up in the hallway on a stretcher and Beth was like ‘What are you doing? How do you feel?’ I said ‘I don’t have headache.’ I’d had a headache for a decade. I didn’t fully understand it until waking up and I felt really good.”
With his new pain-free lease on life, Edge pushed the physical barriers a little further as his acting career moved along.
“My roles at some point call for some physicality, which was part of the reason I was hired,” he said. “I’d do my own stunts and I’d feel fine. When I got the Vikings role, and again some pretty physical scenes, I still felt fine.”
With each physical hurdle he’d clear, it became clearer to the former WWE star that his neck issues were behind him. He continued to challenge himself physically.
“Vikings was so much fun and such an amazing experience,” Edge said. “You’d be doing certain scenes and just feel like ‘Whoa, this is going to look insane.’ It was a blast, an absolute blast. But in doing all of those things, I kept saying to myself, ‘Man, I feel pretty good.’ ”
You can take the wrestler out of wrestling, but you can’t take the wrestling out of the wrestler. As he continued to push the boundaries of physical health, with things like mountain biking, as well as his own TV stunts, Edge invited his longtime friend and fellow WWE star Sheamus to his home. Sheamus had developed his own Celtic Warrior workout.
“Sheamus was coming up to do his Celtic Warrior workouts and I thought to myself ‘I’ll take that big albino gorilla out on a bike and see how he can do,’ ” Edge said with a chuckle. “He’s always looking for different challenges that he hasn’t done.”
When Sheamus visited, Edge got his longtime friend out on a mountain bike ride. To call the ride fateful would a massive understatement.
“He came up for the Celtic Warrior workouts and I got him out on a mountain bike and took him on this nice trail that had some jumps,” Edge said. While racing down the trail, Edge recalled how he was setting the pace. “I’m cooking and my brother-in-law’s behind me with the GoPro and I hit this one jump that had been rained out a little bit, but I hadn’t done it since before we’d had a lot of rain. Instead of a nice slope, it was like boom, straight up. I went ‘uh-oh.’ ”
As if reliving that moment in slow motion, Edge described how that jump changed his life.
“As soon as I hit it, I said to myself ‘I’ve got to take an arm drag.’ So in the air, I unclipped my feet (from the pedals) and I just took an arm drag on the rocks and I rolled up and I was like Woah,’ he said. Whoa for a couple of reason. Whoa because he mostly landed unscathed, save for a couple of scrapes, but also whoa because he realized something else that the bike bump had just show him: “I felt fine,” he said. “I felt fine. I had a gnarly road rash on my hip and my elbow, but I was fine. I rolled up and I remember I said that people were going to see that and wonder why can’t I wrestle. That’s the first thing that went through my head. And it was the first question I asked myself, too.”
It dawned on Copeland that day. Clearly, the surgery had healed his neck, but more importantly, the time away had healed his heart.
“You know, as much as I love acting and as much as I love some of the other endeavours I’ve taken on, there is still nothing that matches your first love. No woman can say it, nothing else can say it, wrestling was my first love and it was what I always wanted to do. So that day made me wonder if there was a window to getting this back, even if were for a short time, limited dates, I don’t know. But it was that wipeout that really started kind of causing the light bulbs to start to flash again because at that stage, at nine years, the ship hadn’t just sailed, it was on the other side of the world. You couldn’t even see it on the horizon.”
He remounted his bike that fateful day and, for the first time in more than 3,200 days, Copeland felt a little bit of Edge within himself.
“It was a shot in the dark,” he said, but before he could even think about allowing the Rated-R Superstar to re-emerge, he needed to find out if he was physically capable.
“I needed to know for my own sake in terms of my life. I never got a checkup after the second neck surgery,” Edge said. “So where am I at? What do I need to avoid? What can I do?” Those were the initial questions he asked himself.
There was also getting himself back into pro wrestling shape.
“We’d went through a rough patch, losing our parents, me losing my mom and Beth her dad,” Edge said. “I was carrying the girls up the stairs one night and I got to the top and I was exhausted. It was like ‘Whoa, I’ve got to get back in shape here’ and the impetus for that was because I’ve got to be there for them.”
If he had any hope of wrestling again, Edge knew he first had to get into ring shape.
“As I started to feel better, I really kicked the diet in and I built a gym in the house,” he said. “At first, I needed the incentive, but then it became the discipline again, and it felt great to have that discipline in my life again and I started feeling great, started feeling healthy and then \the snowball started to become an avalanche.”
By the time WWE hosted SummerSlam in Toronto in 2019, Adam Copeland was in mid-transformation.
“About a week before SummerSlam in Toronto, I was going up there to close my mom’s estate, which I’d been putting off for like a year and I thought ‘Well, if I close her estate on the back end of this at SummerSlam, I can see a bunch of friends and Beth’s doing commentary for NXT, so I can just kind of try and have some celebratory aspects on the back end of this thing that I’m really not looking forward to doing,’ ” he said.
He arrived backstage at SummerSlam, where he met then WWE chairman Vince McMahon, who asked Edge if he’d like to go to the ring and cut a promo, which he did. Edge went to the ring to a huge ovation, where he was confronted by antagonist Elias. During the segment, Edge could no longer contain the monster within himself. He had to know.
“Elias and I got out there and thankfully he’s a pro because I just felt froggy and it was quite interesting to see his eyes when I looked at him,” Edge recalled. “I gave him one of those looks and my legs started jumping and you could see it dawning on him like ‘Ohhhh.’ And I did it, I hit him with the Spear. It just felt like that’s what the crowd wanted. I was like, ‘OK, I’ve just got to do this, and whatever happens after this, I had this, in Toronto, cool.’ ”
Once again, pain free.
Five months later, in one of the most memorable moments in WWE history, Edge made his improbable return, electrifying the masses and defying the odds. A year later, he won the Royal Rumble.
“I’d never experienced anything like that because that had never happened before,” he said. “Nobody’d been gone nine years. I think Bryan was gone maybe two years and I think Shawn was gone four years. I was gone a decade. It’s honestly very hard to put into words, it really is. Nothing will fully ever be able to encapsulate exactly what was going on emotionally, all of it.”
On top of all of the emotions of a comeback once written off as impossible, there was a new aspect to this comeback, one that Edge had never had to consider before.
“When I did this before, I didn’t have kids,” he said. “It was a lot easier before when I didn’t have kids because now there is that weight of that responsibility. I never worried about being safe before, and now safety is a concern. And then there’s the aspect of ‘OK, well, how’s my wind going to be because I haven’t done this in nine years.’ Nothing can prepare you for all of that emotion directed entirely on you. It’s a bit of a mind melt.”
One thing Edge was certain about that night was that he was healthy, and ready for anything the business could throw at him.
“I had full confidence in myself,” he said. “That I had. I think the first bump I took was the Deep 6 from (Baron) Corbin,” he recalled. “It’s a bit of a bump. I was like ‘Get it done, get it out of the way, then everybody knows.”
Edge had been cleared to return, passed every physical test thrown his way, many times over.
“It’s not like it was just me deciding ‘Oh, hey, I think I can do this again’ and then just hopping in there,” he said. “I went through multiple clearances. For Beth, that was the biggest thing and making sure that she heard it from the professionals and from the man who medically disqualified me before. She always said he was like the big boss in a video game. She’d say ‘I think the big boss is going to shut it down.’ But there we were.”
Edge said he knows that even though she didn’t say it, Beth had strong concerns for her husband’s return, at least initially.
“I’m inside my head so I know what confidences I have, but for her, she was just going off of my word and the doctor’s words,” he said. “So there was a lot of emotional turmoil I know for her, but I think she also knew that once the opportunity kind of poked its head up, it was like Rocky Balboa in the last Rocky Balboa film. He had to get the stuff out of the basement. I watched that movie like two days before the Rumble and I was just in tears because so many of the monologues were all thoughts that had run through my head. I was like ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have watched this.’ ”
This time, Edge said, he knows when it’s over, he won’t shut wrestling out of his life.
“I think after this though, I’ll all be able to watch it and go ‘OK, cool.’ ”
The Rated-R Superstar has looked as good as ever in the ring since his return three years ago. It’s evident that fire still burns within him, but most notable is the extra bounce in his step, evidence that he’s soaking it all in.
“I’m having the time of my life,” he said. “And it almost took the nine years away so that when I got this back, I’m like ‘I’m not looking past any aspect of this.’ I’m going to soak in every nanosecond of this, and that goes to the entrance, that goes to the match, that goes to the promos, that goes to every aspect of it. I am all in and I’m trying to create. I feel like just on the entrances alone, I come flying out there, having the time of my life and throwing as much energy as I have at that audience. And I think they see it, so they throw it back and then it becomes a thing. Now it’s this communal kind of relationship and I didn’t have that before. I didn’t have it like this. It feels different now and I think I feel different to them now because a lot more of Adam is out there now. There was no Adam out there before. I was just playing a character. Now, it’s blurred a lot because the veil has been pulled back on our industry a lot so now they know Adam’s ride and road to get Edge back. I think that’s made the dynamic and the relationship a lot deeper and a lot different than it was before.”
It also hasn’t hurt that he’s been able to work alongside his wife.
“I get to team with my wife,” he said through a smile. “I got to team with Beth not once, but twice. And the girls got to see us at the Rumble. In Montreal, I got to sit there and watch Beth against Rhea, for me, I was just over the moon because secretly – or not so secretly — that was a goal of mine. I was like ‘If in this story those two can get in there, man, that’d be amazing’ because I know for Rhea, Beth was one of the women that showed her with her build and her strength, it was OK and she could do this.”
Edge paid tribute to his wife’s place in wrestling history.
“I know when Beth retired initially, she was like ‘Man, nothing changed for women’s wrestling.’ I told her I think it did. I think it did, but that I thought we were just going to have to wait. I was like ‘Give it five years. I have a feeling.’ And here comes Rhea, and here come Bianca and here comes all of these women. I was like ‘Honey, you’re part of the reason for that.’ ”
As for his own legacy, Edge is savouring a second chance to add to it, but is noncommittal when asked about this possibly of this being his last WrestleMania.
“I’m treating it like it is,” he said. “But I think I treated the last one like it was and I treated the one before that like it was. I have to. Because if I don’t, and it was, then dammit, I should have soaked that in more and I’m not doing that. I’m not looking past anything now. I really treat every WrestleMania like it’s the last one. I know that sounds cliche, but that that’s truly what I do. I don’t fully know. What I do know is I want to retire in Toronto. That I know.”
With his contract with WWE set to expire in September, Edge said he’s leaving all doors open at the moment, including the possibility that he will retire when WWE hosts Friday Night SmackDown in Toronto in August.
“This June will be 25 years since my television debut, so it feels like it would be kind of cool to do a nice little retirement tour almost,” he said. “Not a greatest hits, because I want to go out and go. There is lots up in the air right now, honestly, and I think a lot of it will get answered in and around August and September.”
In the meantime, Edge will face Finn Balor at Hell in a Cell on Sunday and continue to savour every minute of time he was once told he’d never get back.
“I’m 49 years old. I love my life,” he said. “I have two spectacular, healthy little girls. I’ve got a dream wife. I’ve got a dream life and on top of that, I’ve got my dream gig back. Everything now is just gravy.”
And when the time comes to say goodbye to his first true love, he’ll do so on his terms this time.
“I would like it to be in Toronto,” he reiterated of his final match. “I think that’s something I want to hold firm to. Would I prefer it to be a pay-per-view? Sure. Would I prefer it to be in a stadium? Sure. But to me, it’s more important for it to be in Toronto than let’s say that it has to be WrestleMania. Just because that’s where I started. So why not bring it full circle and be like ‘There, that’s the end of the story.’”
And what a story it has been.
What they said: WWE superstars share their thoughts on Edge’s legacy
Zelina Vega: “I think I jumped really high when I saw him coming out. It was something that, as a collective, everybody in the room kind of levitated at once, just pure happiness. We know how much this means to him. It’s one of those moments that you don’t expect, it didn’t get spoiled, it was just perfect.”
Natalya: “Somebody asked me earlier what is my Canadian Mount Rushmore of wrestlers, and I never would include myself because I always take myself out of it when I choose those things, but I said Bret Hart, Owen Hart, Stu Hart and Edge. I am very biased, I think my family is incredible, but Edge cemented a legacy that is unmatched, it’s unparalleled. He’s a 31-time champion in WWE, he has lost everything and gained it all back again at a time in his life that nobody ever thought it was possible. He is the Tom Brady of WWE. I think we continue to celebrate Edge because he changed the game for young Canadian wrestlers that had a dream. I know he was inspired by Bret Hart, I know that he was inspired by my family, but not a lot of people know this, but Edge has been helping me with my promos. I look to him as a role model. I had a promo a couple of weeks ago and he got on a call with me and talked to me for an hour and coached me through my promo. This guy’s a 31-time champion in WWE and one of the greatest WWE superstars in the history of the company and he is helping me because he still thinks about giving back, he still thinks about how he can try to move the business forward. That’s why he’s so important. That’s why his legacy is unmatched.”
Viking Raiders’ Ivar: “When I went down with a neck injury, Edge was one of the first guys to contact me. He was a real great friend to me throughout all of my issues with my neck, the surgery, the recovery. He was there every step of the way. He would text me out of the blue just to see how I was doing. It was super awesome.”
Ricochet: “Where do you even start? Its so funny because after he came back, he sat with a couple of us who he thought had some real potential: me, Apollo Crews, Mustafa Ali, Aleister Black at the time and he was trying to help us, whether it was with promos or character or whatever he was trying to help us get in front of the creative team to just get more opportunities. Like three days a week, he’d call us, talk to us. If we had a promo, we would send it to him or I would just make a promo and send it to him just to see what he would say, make one up about Randy Orton or whatever. Literally, we would talk about it for hours and he would sit down and just tell me what he thinks and tell me how to be better, and tell me what to improve. That just meant the world to me. It’s not something that I asked for. It’s just something that he wanted to do for us and it was great. As far as the wrestling goes, and the inspiration that he has been as far as the tag-team division, singles division, everything that you want to do in this business, Edge has done it, been there and been a star at it. He still continues to this day to be such a nice, positive dude. In the back, he’s the charm everyone wants to be around him. I put him with Rey Mysterio. He’s the shining light of positivity and I think he’s showed some strength to people, coming back after injury. He’s shown it’s possible if you believe and you do the work that it takes, it is possible. If you want to be something in this business, he’s the bar. It’s hard to find anyone who has any bad thing to say about him because he’s such a positive guy.”
Rhea Ripley: “I think Edge is extremely important to this business. I think he is such a superstar in and out of the ring. I feel like I’ve learned so much from him being in The Judgment Day with him, he’s helped me not only with my in-ring stuff, with timing and all of that, but even just being confident on the microphone. He’s such a good talker and you can really tell that he’s been in this business for a long, long time. Watching him as a kid growing up, watching him doing his promo about retiring, getting really emotional. That made me cry, so it’s really been a dream for me being able to work with Edge.”
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