Former WWE star and a former WWE NXT Champion Keith Lee who is also a former WWE NXT North American Champion recently revealed that he nearly died when he was training for his recent return to the All Elite Wrestling.
Keith Lee had a bad history of injury lately. Since the very first day of him joining WWE, the promotion wanted to push him as a big star. Everybody knows the affection of Vince McMahon towards big guys.
Keith Lee Reveals Nearly Dying While Training For Return
Keith Lee was not treated anything differently. He came to WWE team 2018 after having an excellent time in the Ring of Honor, Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, Evolve and some other professional wrestling promotions. He had been quite impressive in his 13 year professional wrestling career before WWE.
In 2018 he came to WWE for the first time in his career. As mentioned above he has been portrayed as a big deal from the very first day of joining WWE. After spending two dominant years in WWE NXT.
He won the WWE NXT championship and the WWE NXT North American Championship. He carried both titles at the same time. On the same year he came to the main roster of WWE. Even though his first main roster appearance was during the Royal Rumble match of 2020 where he was eliminated by Brock Lesnar.
WWE was determined to push him on the main roster but injuries have always been a huge issue for him. Even during his NXT days, he faced injuries, he is facing bad injuries till date. After that he was repackaged and has been given in new name, Bearcat Lee.
It looked like WWE was going to push him in his new avatar. But that did not happen, in fact, he was released from WWE on the very next week and it was quite shocking. Recently, he made his AEW debut and we hope he has a great future in the new promotion.
Keith Lee who is also a former WWE NXT North American Champion recently spoke to the Grapsody podcast where he revealed that he nearly died when he was training for his recent return to the All Elite Wrestling. He said;
“You mean like in-ring training? I don’t do in-ring training. I’m gonna level something here. This is where you’ll really understand why I’m confident in who I am and what I do. Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe in training and believe it’s a good thing to do. When I came back form the almost dead situation, I did a lot of in-ring training, maybe five or six weeks before I returned.
“But it wasn’t enough time to get myself together and be back on a TV show, if that makes sense. Because the after effects of that whole ordeal left me in a position where things like running and some of my favorite versions of cardio were extremely difficult and some just couldn’t be a thought because it was too taxing on me and the recovery was too long.
“So at that time I did a lot of in-ring training and a lot of training outside of that to try to get back into a position to be ready. That’s probably the only time where I’ve been out that I have put in that much effort into returning. Part of it was, at the end of the day, I was prepared to change my entire career.
“Because for the entirety of those five or six months that I was out doing all of that, it was basically expected that if I did too much, I would die and wrestling wasn’t going to be a thing for me going forward. Coming out of that and learning otherwise, I was just excited to do this still in whatever capacity that would be. I was just happy to be able to take part and still be a credit to the industry.”