Will Ospreay says he was in 10 out of 10 pain for months before his neck surgery, and that a decade earlier the same injury would have finished him.
Ospreay went through it all with Chris Van Vliet on Insight, a year after the operation and a fortnight after beating Kenny Omega at Wembley Stadium for the AEW World Championship.
The symptoms started during the Continental Classic, and he did not understand what they were.
“I started getting these weird feelings in my hands. It was like pins and needles, but it just would never go away,” Ospreay said. “And then as it got more and more down the road, like we’d done the Spanish fly off the cage, we’d been doing crazy stuff. My matches haven’t been relatively house show stylised. It’s been very much go, go, go.”
By the summer it was doing more than tingling.
“Then it was like Double or Nothing, and I really started noticing I was in pain. I would take a back bump, and my arm would completely shut off. It would spasm, and I couldn’t pick it up,” he said.
He carried on working, including a cage match. Asked how, his answer was that he did not know how bad it was.
Ospreay eventually raised it himself at All In Texas and went for an MRI. The call that came back was from Tony Schiavone.
“He was just kind of like, ‘ Hey, we just got your MRI results back, you’re done. What do you mean I’m done?” Ospreay said.
Two discs had compressed into his spinal cord. The initial plan discussed with him was an epidural, and it was his surgeon who told him otherwise on a phone call Ospreay took while at a theme park with his son.
“He told me, I don’t know who told you you need an epidural. You need surgery. You’ve got stenosis,” Ospreay said.
He was unsparing about his own part in how it got that far.
“This is me as well. I ignored a lot of what the doctor said and just did what I wanted to do, and because of that, I suffered from it,” he said.
Ospreay had said before the operation that he was scared of coming back at even 50 percent of what he was. He said the reality has been better than anything he let himself expect.
“I’m shocked, being honest with you. I was expecting a lot, lot worse. Even post-surgery, I was wondering what I would look like, and am I going to need a wheelchair to get out of this hospital,” he said. “And it was just, no, I walked out. I done my surgery and I walked out on my own feet. I took a three-hour walk with my wife on the Jacksonville beach. It was beautiful.”
The rehab was slow and largely done in private.
“After like two months, I was just like, okay, back bump on the bed, and still doesn’t feel like my head yet,” Ospreay said. “Every now and again I would just sneak off to an indie and be like, hey, can I just get in the ring for a little bit just to feel the ropes? And the ropes were the weirdest bit for me, because as I would hit the ropes my head would jack back, because I hadn’t built up any of the muscles around the incision.”
He credited Adam Copeland for guiding him through the equipment and the process, calling him brilliant throughout.
What still sits with him is the timing of it. Ospreay has said that had this happened ten years earlier, he would have been finished, and he said that thought scares him.
“I think wrestling has been my identity for so long. Since I was 14 years old I’ve been taking flat backs in a wrestling ring, and sometimes not a wrestling ring, sometimes just mats in a field,” he said. “The idea that if this was 10 years ago, I’d be done, and I’d be forgotten about.”
Told he would not have been forgotten, Ospreay was not sure.
“Wrestling just moves on. It’s a Wednesday. We’ve got a TV show that we’ve got to film. You can’t live in that moment forever,” he said. “It’s lovely to look back on, but I need to keep pushing forward, and I need to keep finding that next emotional attachment that we can all gravitate towards.”
Ospreay said he has a small amount of muscle loss in one arm and nothing close to what he has seen in others who have had the same problem. He also said the first time he found out how much he could still do was Jon Moxley calling for a power driver on a house show, a move he had assumed was gone for good.
“After that it was just kind of like, oh, okay, I actually can do relatively all the things I did beforehand,” he said.
Ospreay makes his first defence against Moxley at All Out on September 26. The two have met once in a singles match, at New Japan’s Windy City Riot in April 2022, which Moxley won.
The timeline runs from Forbidden Door in August 2025, where the Death Riders isolated him in a cage and stretchered him out, through surgery on September 17 and a clearance announced on February 25. He returned at Revolution, wrestled Blake Christian in his first match back, lost to Moxley at Dynasty in April, and was AEW World Champion by the end of August.
