During his interview on the AEW Unrestricted podcast, AEW star Kip Sabian talked about how he came up with the idea to put a box over his head and sit in the stands for AEW:
“The original idea that I had has changed so many times depending on the reactions from the fans. So the initial starting point was, obviously I got injured, full labrum surgery which took longer than it normally would have been because when they got in there, they found that it was torn all the way around. So I was looking at, you know, maybe 12 to 15 months of rehab. For me as someone that’s wrestled since I was 16, so like, I’m 30 now, by that point it had been like 11 years, 12 years, like a really good chunk of my life wrestling non stop. I think the longest I’d had away from wrestling was maybe three weeks in all of that time. So having this break and being told, ‘Hey, you’re not going to wrestle for five months is kind of soul destroying.”
“I’m sitting at home and it was straight after surgery, maybe the first week after surgery, and I’m sitting on my couch because I can’t sleep in my bed because I’m in a big old sling. I’m watching the show and I’m like, man, I don’t want to stay at home for 12 months and do nothing. That’s terrible. Here’s the thing. AEW is so great with the talent. I could have literally sat at home for those 12 months, no issues whatsoever, still getting paid, treating me well, helping me out with my rehab and all of this stuff, but me, I couldn’t do it. So I started going crazy. I was watching the show, which I honestly, I think watching the show every week, now I look back, it was a good thing. Back then I thought it was a bad thing for me because I had such a long time before I could wrestle again, that I’m watching it and it’s making me go more and more down this hole, this dark hole. It wasn’t long before I realized, man, I’m depressed right now. This is terrible, I need to do something.”
“I have a very artistic mind which I think comes from the fact that I, and again I talk about this all the time on my Twitch stream, as someone who has a pretty high functioning ADHD, I’m always having to try and find things to be creative with. I’m a big fan of the acting ability of Shia LeBeouf. There was a stunt that Shia did where it was for the red carpet of, I think it was Nymphomaniac, was the movie. He turned up on the red carpet with a bag on his head that said, ‘I’m not famous anymore’, and he just stood there silently. I remember at the time, I was like, ‘This is great. I don’t understand it, but I like it.’”
On Penelope Ford’s miscarriage:
“I was in limbo at this point (during his injury) and then me and Olivia (Penelope Ford) got pregnant. It was like a light in this situation, but we were very nervous about it. I will go into details about this situation. We finally go in to talk to Tony. No one knows. The only person that knows is Doc. There has to be a reason that she can’t wrestle right now. You just can’t not wrestle. We tell Doc, okay, cool. We finally go into talk to Tony and we are so nervous because you’re going to your boss to say, ‘Hi, she’s not going to be able to wrestle for a year or so, maybe longer now. How do you feel about that?’ So we went in, and were like, ‘Hi Tony. We got some news to tell you’, and the second we told him, if you’ve seen Tony Khan on an AEW stage when a talent has debuted, and they come up the ramp, and he is so excited and so happy and he just jumps and hugs them, that is the moment that we had in Tony’s office with Tony. He had papers in his hand for the show, he threw the papers, and just came over and was so excited. He was like, ‘Whatever you need, however long you need, I support you’, and we were like, ah, weight lifted. Now we can get excited.”
“Then unfortunately for us, about 10 weeks or so, we lost the baby, which, for me was very hard for two reasons. One, we’d got really excited about the fact that we can have a baby because we’ve always wanted children. We just didn’t know with wrestling how we would make that fit. But we’d worked out the time frame and the fact that we have such a supportive family, that we would still be able to work our schedule. Two days a week, we’re gone. We come back, you know, family life. So we were really getting into it. Then it was actually when we were traveling to TV one day, we got in the car, and then it happened. I had to call Bryce straightaway from travel. I said, ‘Dude, we can’t make it in this week. I’ll tell you later. It’s a personal emergency.’ He’s like, ‘Okay, cool. I’ll let everyone know.’
“When she got pregnant, the hormones that changed made the fibroid grow. By the time that we had a miscarriage, it was the size of a cantaloupe. She had this huge growth. It was sticking out. It looked like a bump. We thought we were having twins for a long time because of that, because it was that big. So she’d have to go through the surgery of having that removed. You know, not only have you lost this life, but now you have to go through surgery and rehab and recovery as if you had a C-section. So for her, that was really hard.”
“It’s got to the point now that we look at the silver lining, which is, in my mind, this fibroid has always been there and they can cause complications when they get to that size. So I look at it as this baby sacrificed itself to make us aware of this fibroid so the fibroid could be removed, so when we get pregnant again in the future, the complications are gone. That’s how we’ve tried to look at it. I can’t speak on her behalf, but from my perspective of everything, that definitely gives me hope.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit AEW Unrestricted with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription
