Tyson Kidd had a promising career.
The former WWE Tag Team Champion started out in the tag team division and though he had some great matches with Davey Boy Smith Jr., Kidd didn’t really find his groove until he was sent back down to NXT. The WWE star started crafting an interesting character during his singles run and he even had that unforgettable match against Cesaro.
But then his dark match against Samoa Joe happened.
In a freak accident, Joe accidentally broke Kidd’s neck because of his signature Muscle Buster finisher. Kidd was paralyzed from the neck down and it was eventually revealed that the former WWE Tag Team Champion would never be able to step back into the squared circle.
As you can imagine, this was devastating and Kidd recently recalled those moments following the injury and his realization that he’ll never wrestle.
“I love wrestling. It’s given me everything. Everything I got, wrestling.” He said on Developmentally Speaking. “ I had no clue what I was going to do. That first night when I got hurt, I’m not even in a hospital room. I’m in the basement of this hospital. It’s cold, freezing cold. I had no service, like one bar in and out. I’m sitting there with this neck brace on, with no real answers. The surgeon comes on the morning to kind of give me the news. But I’m very in tune with my body, and in the moment, I knew my neck was broken. I knew I was never wrestling again. I knew that in that moment.
Once that dawning realization became clear, Tyson was unsure of what was next for him.
"In that moment, I did not know what was next. I had no clue. I didn’t know anything. I just knew that this dream that I’d seen through, this version of it, was over. I didn’t know what was next. Prior to that, I did think I had a long-term plan. I remember they were talking to me about signing a new deal. In my mind, I was going to sign. This is just in my mind. In my mind, I was going to sign a five-year deal that would take me til I was 40. At 40, I will have been wrestling at that point for 25 years."
40 seemed to be the perfect number that TJ wanted to end his career on. But the WWE star believes that he wouldn’t have likely left at that time because of how stacked the roster became throughout the years.
"I’m 40, everything seemed like a nice, perfect round number, and then I kind of wanted to get out. That was my mind. I’m sure when I got there, that wouldn’t have happened. Especially when you start adding AJ Styles and those types of guys to the roster. If I had been afforded the opportunity to stay as a talent, I promise I wouldn’t have left. But in my mind at this time, 40 was going to be perfect, and then I would start a wrestling school in Tampa,"
Wilson works backstage as one of the producers in WWE. While his in-ring career is over, Wilson still has an accomplished career that not may men and women can say they had. Check out the full interview where the WWE star goes into depth about his career.