5 WWE Superstars who vacated their championships due to injury
Sep 13, 2016 at 4:45 PM
It’s indeed frustrating to relinquish the world titles due to injury. Superstars fight tooth and nail for the championships their entire career. They don’t intend to lose it for anything after capturing the dream gold. However, the pro-wrestling world is injury-prone, and hence there are multiple examples when WWE starts had to vacate their world titles due to career-threatening injuries. Here are top 5 of them.
Seth Rollins
Rollins had an incredible run in the year 2015 after becoming the WWE World Heavyweight Champion at Wrestlemania 31. Many had thought that he would hold the title until Wrestlemania 32 but he suffered an unfortunate knee injury in a live event from Ireland. Due to the incident, “the man” had to vacate the title out of nowhere when he was at the top of the food chain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKYYsg-jMfU
Stone Cold Steve Austin
Stone Cold was competing in a match against Owen Hart for the Intercontinental Championship back in 1997. Owen botched a piledriver move which broke Austin’s neck. He had to relinquish his title at that point. Though Austin came back from that stronger than ever, the injury was the reason, Austin had to quit the in-ring competition, earlier than expected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUx4mFjOkQE
John Cena
John Cena had suffered some serious concussions in different parts around his body. He is superhuman and hence able to make his comeback every time earlier than expected. In the year 2007, Cena was the WWE championship holder and torn his pectoral muscle against Mr. Kennedy. He had to relinquish the title. Even, in the year 2013 during Summerslam, he lost to Daniel Bryan. He has a bruised elbow back then which was the original cause of coming up short.
Daniel Bryan
Bryan had to relinquish titles different times in his career. He had a nasty neck injury which gave him trouble for his entire career. After Wrestlemania 30, he due to legit concussions he had to relinquish the WWE World Heavyweight championship. He returned for a couple of times but had to relinquish the Intercontinental title twice in 2014 and 2015. Then came the saddest day when he decided to take retirement, earlier this year.
Edge
Edge’s retirement day is considered to be one of the saddest days in WWE history. He had the neck issues from 2003 and continued wrestling with that till 2011. It was the stage when not only his career but life was in danger. We saw him relinquishing the title on Smackdown on the day of his retirement. But, prior to that, he relinquished his world title in 2007 and the tag team title in 2009. He’s the one who was troubled by concussions his entire wrestling career.