Kevin Owens says Randy Orton is the reason he found the surgeon who operated on his neck, and that the damage was severe enough that he was warned he could be left with lasting effects.
Owens returned at SummerSlam night two on Sunday in Minneapolis, pinning Sami Zayn in a four-way that also included Finn Balor and Gunther to become number one contender to CM Punk. It was his first match in 17 months. He had neck fusion surgery on July 18, 2025.
Speaking to Sam Roberts on WWE Now shortly after the match, Owens was asked whether there was a point where he thought it was not going to happen.
“Yeah, there was a good chunk of time where, so I had the best surgeon, Dr. Adam Cantor. I cannot. I just texted him that actually. I cannot thank him enough for what he did. I’ll forever be in debt to him. But Randy Orton actually is the one who put me in touch with him. WWE has an amazing medical staff. We had amazing surgeons that we work with all the time, right? But Randy had worked with Cantor. Adam Cantor is the one who did Randy’s back surgery and saved his career.”
Orton missed the best part of eighteen months with a back injury before returning at Survivor Series in 2023.
“And he recommended that I talk to Adam Cantor as well, get several opinions on how to handle this next surgery. I decided to go with Adam Cantor because if Randy Orton could trust him, there’s not a whole lot of people in wrestling I respect more than Randy. I trust Adam Cantor. I’m so glad I went in that direction.”
He then described what the surgery was dealing with.
“So, as amazing a surgeon as he is, the severity of my injury and the damage to my spinal cord was so severe that even though they decompressed my spinal cord a lot, fixed a lot in there, there are still chances that I’d have lasting effects of the damage. And at one point, my bones weren’t growing exactly how they should, or as fast as they do for other people. So we kept doing scans and scans and scans, and it just it wasn’t it didn’t look the way it was supposed to. So it was it was scary, man. It was scary.”
Clearance came in early July. Owens said he was on holiday in France with his family at the time and cut the trip short by a day so that his first session back in the ring would fall on July 18, exactly a year after the operation, with a Performance Center trainer coming in on a day off to make it possible.
Owens also spoke about what the time away did to his confidence. He is 42, and said watching the shows while he was out left him wondering whether he still belonged.
“I never had any doubt that it’d be special for me when I came back, right? But I, it’s it’s weird to say, but a year it was more than a year, so a year and a half for me, like 16 months from you know last match to now, a lot happens in wrestling, and throughout that time, as I watched, sometimes I watch and thought, as this passed me by, maybe, maybe it’s not like I’m 42 years old. We got the guys like Oba, Trick, the younger guys are coming up. I’m not that no more.”
The doubts were practical as well as existential.
“Can I do what I used to do? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I can run the ropes yet. You know, as I’m watching this, because that’s the thing, right? Every scan I go, okay. I know I can’t wrestle, but can I run the ropes? And they’re like, nope, nope, nope. So I’m like, I don’t even know if I can run the ropes, because before my surgery, running the ropes was an arduous task. Like it was difficult.”
“So anyway, as I watched this, I’m like, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I don’t know what this is anymore. Maybe you know what I mean. Maybe I don’t have the mind for it. I don’t know. And quite frankly, I’d watch the show and go, man, people love this, and I go, I don’t get it. So I was like, maybe this just passed me by.”
He said he could not tell from the ring how the crowd had reacted, because of the way sound carries in a stadium.
“You know, so I’m like, well, they look like they’re happy. I couldn’t really hear it.”
Owens thanked the surgeon, his assistant, WWE’s medical staff and the Performance Center trainers by name.
