Lower back problems force Christian to the ‘injured list’
by Phil Speer
June 8, 2004


For the first time in his six-year WWE career, Christian finds himself on the sidelines, unable to compete because of a disc problem in his lower back.

The Toronto native prides himself on having the longest consecutive streak without an injury – or at least without one significant enough to force him to miss ring time.

“I’ve never missed any time for an injury,” Christian told WWE.com. “It’s hard for me to call (WWE officials) and admit that I’m hurt. It was like, ‘Man, I don’t want to call them.’ It’s just a hard thing for me to do.”

But the former Intercontinental Champion could not even stand up and was experiencing numbness in his right leg. He knew he had no choice but to see a doctor.

The problem started May 8 during a live event in Lafayette, La. That night, Christian said, he “tweaked” his back.

“I thought it was a sciatic nerve,” he said. “I just figured it was normal. I put some ice on it. … It’s been a pain that I’ve had many times in the past.”

Two days later, on Monday Night RAW, Christian battled Chris Jericho in an extremely physical and bloody Cage Match.

“I took that superplex off the top of the cage, and I felt (my back) again just tighten up on me,” he said.

But again, Christian assumed it was a normal pain that comes with the job. Once again, he put ice on his back and figured he’d battle on.

Christian had a red-eye back to his home in Tampa, Fla., late that night after RAW. Before the flight, he stopped for a quick bite to eat.

“I got up to leave the restaurant,” he said. “I couldn’t stand up straight, couldn’t put any weight on my right leg.”

He had to be helped to his car, and he knew there was simply no way he could fly home that night. He said to himself, “How am I going to walk through an airport? I can’t walk.”

Using his bag as a walker, he checked into a hotel. Preoccupied with his concerns about his back, he ended up misreading his room number.

“I walked all the way down the hall and realized my room was all the way on the other side,” he said. He now chuckles at the memory, but at the time, walking down a long hallway was a nightmare, and he said he cursed himself the entire way.

Once he finally arrived in his hotel room, he said, “I dropped my bags, fell on my bed, and just lay there.”

The next morning, “I actually had to crawl on my hands and knees to the bathroom because I couldn’t stand up.

But, using his bag as a walker again, he managed to get to the airport and catch an extremely uncomfortable flight back to Tampa. Christian normally likes to sit in a window seat and lean over so he can sleep, but he was unable to do that without triggering intense pain.

Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, he said, the pain was so bad that “it was like someone stabbing a knife in my lower back.”

He could barely stand and walk, and when he sat down for a period of time, his right leg would go numb.

That Friday, Christian went to get a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on his lower back. He got the results on Monday, while he was in San Diego for Monday Night RAW.

When he got back to Tampa, he got a second opinion, and that physician told him the same thing: One of the vertebrae in his lower back has slipped forward, causing damage to one of his discs and pinching multiple nerves. The pinched nerves were causing the numbness in his right leg.

Doctors encouraged him to “look at the big picture” – to take a few months off now and let his back heal. Otherwise, if he kept doing what he does – kept wrestling – he’d be forced to undergo surgery within a few years.

That’s the last thing Christian wants to do. “At all costs, I want to avoid having surgery,” he said. “Six, seven or eight weeks of not wrestling is better than going on, having surgery and missing a year.”

So Christian has been focusing on intense physical therapy. “I do it every day,” he said. “I started at a low level and now I’m up to the fourth level, after two weeks. I’m feeling much better already.”

For example, Christian said he’s no longer experiencing numbness in his leg. He returns to the doctor in a few weeks for a progress report.

Christian has battled through the flu and a myriad of sprains, aches and pains, but he couldn’t just ignore this problem. As loathe as he is to miss ring time, an injury like this is virtually inevitable for someone like him – a veteran of several Cage, Ladder and Table matches, as well as TLC (Tables, Ladders and Chairs) matches, which Jim Ross has described as career-shortening.

“(The doctor) said it wasn’t from the one fall that I had in my Cage Match,” Christian said, referring to his back problems. “It was from all the falls I’ve had in 10 years of wrestling.”