During a recent appearance on the ‘Talk is Jericho’ podcast, WWE Hall of Famer Edge (now known under his real name Adam Copeland) revealed why he decided to part ways with WWE.
Here’s what The Rated-R Superstar had to say:
“I think, too, you and I are both wired the same. I think anybody who’s been in this industry, as long as guys like us, you’re driven by challenges. You’re not just going to show up to something and the same old same old is only going to work so long.
And eventually, you got to get challenged, you got to recreate yourself, you have to reinvent your character. You have to make tweaks, things like that change your style, whatever that is, in order to keep yourself creatively stimulated. Well, that also goes to who you’re working with. And I mean, I could work Seth Rollins every day of the week, and it’d be amazing. But we’ve wrestled now, okay. And I wrestled Finn, okay. Wrestled Roman, okay. Wrestled AJ, like, there was a list of guys that I wanted to work with, and I worked most of them.
And we just kind of got to a point I think, you know, I’ve said, I think both sides were just out of ideas. And that’s okay. It’s not, it’s no one’s fault. And I truly feel like that’s kind of the way it was. I have a small window here to be able to contribute to the wrestling industry as a whole, and be able to pull off matches that I want to pull off at a certain level. I know that the timeframe is small. It’s not like I got another 10 years left in me to do it the way I want to do it. And I wanted to maximize them.
And to their point to WWE’s point is, you know, well, if you’re around too much, it’s not special, and I can see that I get it. I just felt like if I got two years or if I got a year then let’s take the governor off and let’s go. That’s really all boiled down to, and then I look at it and you know, when I did sit down with my family and talk and my girls made it real simple they said just go with Uncle Jay.
I mean, when a 9-year-old can really simplify for you like that and just kind of smack in the face with like, clearly it’s gotta be that dad. Like, what do you think? Because for a while, like, after the Toronto show, I was like, God, this might be it, man. Because I was loving it. We (Edge & Sheamus) just in there and we’d never worked to singles but it was so much fun and the crowd was just, you know, halfway through I was like, Man, this might be it, this might be because this is so much fun.
And I want my last match, whatever that is, to feel fun. And that was, so I really took some time to just kind of sit on my butt, and then sit with it and see where were my heart and my brain sometimes have different ideas. I just needed to kind of get through all of that and decide where it was going to be. And again, the girls just really simplified it for me and made it a kind of a no-brainer when they said that.”
Edge made his televised World Wrestling Federation debut in June 1998 and he stayed with the promotion until he was forced to retire in April 2011 due to a bone disease called ‘cervical spinal stenosis’.
However, the 2012 WWE Hall of Famer was cleared of the disease several years later and made his triumphant return to WWE at the 2020 Royal Rumble and has worked as a part-time WWE Superstar until his recent contract expired in 2023 and he jumped ship to AEW.
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