Adam Copeland Wants To Maximise The Time He Has Left In Wrestling
Adam Copeland explains in detail why he chose to leave WWE for AEW.
Adam Copeland has now competed in his first match in AEW, taking on Luchasaurus on the special Title Tuesday edition of Dynamite. Copeland survived interference from his old friend Christian Cage and Nick Wayne to clobber his prehistoric opponent with the TNT Title before finishing him off with a Spear.
Speaking to his former tag team partner Chris Jericho on the Talk Is Jericho podcast, Adam Copeland explained in depth what drove him to make a change so late in his career and jump into a new challenge in AEW:
“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’ve got to get challenged, you’ve 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 no one’s fault.
“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’ve got another 10 years left in me to do it the way I want to do it. And I wanted to maximise them.”
Adam Copeland wants his final match to be fun
Adam Copeland then explained how WWE had wanted to keep him as a special attraction and admits he almost did hang up his boots for good after his final bout in the company against Sheamus in his hometown of Toronto:
“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’ve got two years or if I’ve got a year then let’s go. That’s really all it 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 nine-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 [Adam and Sheamus] just in there and we’d never worked 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. And 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.”
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