By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
CBS Sports interview with Adam Copeland
Host: Shakiel Mahjouri
Story available via CBSSports.com
Adam Copeland on reuniting with Christian Cage: “If we could end this together, that’s the dream. I said in the presser last night, too, I sat down with my girls and I’m like, ‘Okay, so what does dad do, girls?’ What do I do? And I laid out the scenarios for them. Lyric said it and then Ruby agreed, ‘Go be with Uncle Jay [Christian Cage] and have fun.’ And that doesn’t mean that I’m not having fun in other places, but they know the most fun I’m going to have is with my best friend of the last 40 years.”
Adam Copeland insists he only started formally speaking with AEW after his WWE contract expired: “Jay is my best friend. I’m great friends with FTR. So we would just talk about, ‘Hey, what’s it like there?’ And they say, ‘How’s it going up there?’ Just normal talk, but not a lot. It wasn’t until my contract was up on the 21st. It wasn’t until then. So it was a really, really quick to get everything done and get everything dialed in. Figuring out so many things like getting with Alter Bridge and getting the music and doing all of those things. There were nine or ten days. I didn’t know immediately, but I thought that’s where I wanted to go. I really thought that working with Jay again was what I wanted to do and how I pictured it in a perfect world. Beth [Phoenix] said, ‘What’s your perfect world? ‘I was like, ‘My perfect world is that I end my career with Jay.’ So suddenly that perfect world looked like it could be there. It’s tough to pass that up.”
Adam Copeland on last WWE match: “I mean, honestly, at that stage where I was at, I truly felt like, ‘Okay, this is probably my last time in Toronto.’ A lot of the time I wear my heart on my sleeve out there and I’m unfiltered. So you’re getting Adam Copeland and you’re getting his thoughts at that time. Now, thoughts can always change and things like that. As I got closer to the end of the deal, retirement was a very, very real option. It was not off the table. This was not just, ‘I’m going there.’ I really sat with the idea of retirement because I truly thought like, ‘Man, WWE gave me that night. I don’t know how that gets topped.’ And that’s still in my brain. But I guess now it’s like, ‘Okay, how can I try and top it in this new environment.’ Honestly, that Toronto show was a sendoff of that character and it was the perfect way for that character to go out. Wrestling a guy that I’ve never wrestled that I always wanted to. It was just so much fun in there. That night, I’ll never forget it. I’ll always have that night with me. I told Sheamus that too. That will be one of the most special nights in my career, always. It truly felt as that night was going on and the march was going and the feeling during the match, the feeling after the match, I just truly felt like, I don’t think I’m going to stop that feeling.”
What was left for him in WWE: “I kind of got the sense there wasn’t really a plan. I get it because what else do we do? What else is there to do? And after 25 years I’ve literally done everything there. So what do we do? It wasn’t anybody’s fault… I was coming up against creative walls too. I was having a hard time coming up with ideas and that’s not usually the case. I think they were too. There was also the conundrum that I was contracted for ten matches a year. I offered to do more, but to their point it wouldn’t feel quite as special, which I understood too.
“So there was a weird kind of conundrum, right? It just felt like neither one of us really had any ideas and that’s never been the case before. So when you look at that and then I look at my best friend over there having the time of his life, at a certain point, once I thought, ‘You know what, I still have a window here where I can do this and I don’t feel like I’m maximizing that.’ I think that was really what it boiled down to. I want to try and maximize what I still have left. If that’s one year, if that’s two years, I want to do it as much as I can while I still feel like I can. I know that’s going to be hard and I know that’s going to take a lot of work physically. I know there’s a different fallout now, but I know all of those things and I really just want to weigh the glory of this thing as much as I can.”
Whether AEW will be Adam Copeland’s last full-time run: “I think that’s a very safe thing to say because I know how much work it’s going to take to be able to pull it off. I know that. I’m not in any way trying to fool myself into thinking I’m just going to trot through this whole thing. It’s not going to be that. I know what it’s going to be. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be a lot of hard work. I enjoy hard work. I always have. It’s how I’m wired. It’s what I was born with. It’s in my DNA. So that’s super fun. But I also I’m a realist and I understand that I’m not going to be able to maintain it for a super long time. I’d say that’s a very fair, very fair, safe bet.”
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