The first ever WWE Universal champion Finn Balor recently talked to ESPN where he talked about a lot of things regarding his return, injury, time off and lots of other stuff. Here are some highlights below;
“I kind of looked around and I thought, ‘Well, there’s two things that can happen here. You can tell the referee that you think you seriously hurt your shoulder and to stop the match, or you can get back in the ring and assess it in 30 seconds.'”
As the work it took to get to this match flashed through Balor’s mind, the decision suddenly became easy. There’s no point in quitting now.
“I came 16 years to this point,” he said. “I’m not going to throw in the towel a moment earlier than I think I have to.”
“I used to watch it as a kid on TV nonstop. Books, magazines, I’d even send away for rare [VHS] tapes from Mexico and Japan. This was before there was YouTube and everything was easily accessible. I was trying to get a collection of different leagues of wrestling, essentially just trying to absorb as much as I could and see as many different performers as I could.”
“It morphed from training to, ‘Hey, I want to have one match,’ to ‘Hey, I want to have two matches’ and then it became three years of wrestling in the UK.”
“The president of New Japan Pro Wrestling — which is the second biggest wrestling company in the world — came to visit the training centre,” recalled Balor. “He said, ‘Oh, I see something in this guy. I want to take him to Tokyo and I want him to train in the New Japan Dojo.’
“It’s renowned as the toughest wrestling dojo in the world. It’s about mental toughness and stamina and trying to break people mentally on top of physically … and it just had a reputation [in] turning out the best talent.”
“It wasn’t until it started popping out on really minor things, like pushing him in the back, that I realised, ‘oh, no. this is going to be a big problem tomorrow.'”
“He’s super hard-working; never skipped a day of rehab, never even skipped a rep,” Wilk said. He went on to highlight the degree of Balor’s dedication which expanded beyond his specific therapy regimen to include maintenance of his overall fitness level, nutrition and rest. “He’s driven to make it back to the top. As driven as any athlete I’ve ever seen.”
“He worked hard within the confines of what we told him was OK,” Dugas said. “He’s done everything right and he hasn’t done too much too soon, which was critical to his recovery.”
“We don’t know he’s ready until he gets in the ring and tests it,” said Wilk. “But his confidence has definitely been coming back recently which is always a good sign.”
“I don’t think you ever know,” said Balor when asked if he knew when his body was ready for him to return. “It’s one of those things that I won’t know when I’m ready until I’m actually in the ring and doing it in front of people live. You can kind of run drills and practice, rehab behind closed doors as much as you can, but there’s nothing that simulates being in front of a live audience with live TV cameras.”