Ivar Details the Injury That Nearly Ended His Career, The War Raiders’ Return

– During a recent interview with Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Ivar of The War Raiders discussed the injury that nearly ended his career, The War Raiders’ recent successful return, and more. Below are some highlights provided to us by Insight:

Ivar on The War Raiders’ recent return: “When I had this opportunity to do the singles run and it was going well, I had a conversation with Triple H where he said, ‘Hey, how about we start pulling back off of the heavy Viking stuff, slowly peeling some of those layers off so we can tell more stories with you.’ I’m like, Oh, that’s great. So as we started to do that I got hurt again. Then Erik and I were ready to come back. I think we were actually scheduled to return in Calgary at Raw. At the last second, they pulled our travel and said that we’re gonna hold off for now. Oh man, here we go. They’re like, ‘No, nothing bad. We want to hold off. We want to have better creative for you.’ And then the next week, we got a phone call, ‘Hey, how do you guys feel coming back as The War Raiders?’ And we were like yeah that sounds good. That sounds really good.”

On if they had any talk on bringing back their earlier ring names: “I think at this point we spent five years in the main roster as Erik and Ivar, especially with the Ivar singles run. That’s how we’re known. I think it would have felt like an erase of everything we’ve done. I don’t think we want to erase everything that we’ve done on the main roster. We’ve done some great things including singles run, our Raw Tag Title run that we had, all the stuff that we did with The Street Profits, whether people liked it or not, it’s our history. I loved every second of it, and I don’t think we want to erase that.”

On a potential split for the team: “So, no. I’ve answered this a few times before. I mean, New Day’s having their turmoil now, but for a decade on WWE television New Day’s been together and it’s never happened, yet. So I feel like we’re in the same boat, maybe we can do singles things on the side. Maybe we don’t have a story in the tag division and something opens up for, you know, me for the Intercontinental title, or maybe something opens up for Erik for the Speed Championship, just one below whatever I’m doing [laughs]. But I think we can do things. We’re both great singles wrestlers. I don’t think anyone realized that until I had this recent singles run, and he’s just as good. If just the opportunity is there it’s great, but I don’t see us breaking up. I don’t see us splitting up. I think we’re always gonna be there to support each other.”

Ivar on his near career-ending injury: “So it started in Brooklyn before WrestleMania, me and Ricochet had a match. I took a European uppercut and I was like, whoa. Did a system check. I’m like, I’m okay. I’m all right. And then after that, I was doing Main Event, Raw, NXT, NXT coconut shows. I was doing some SmackDown dark stuff. I was just on everything. Then it got to that match with Oba Femi for the North American Championship in NXT. We got to the second half of that match and I just lost all strength in my right arm. I couldn’t pick him up, so I just started calling audibles in the ring where I wasn’t going to pick him up. We made it through the match, and that was that. The whole time we were checking on medical to see how I was doing. Then after that match was like, okay, that’s no good. Then I went to Discovery Cove that week with my wife just to be like, Okay, I need a break, like a reset. Usually, when we do vacation things, it’s go, go, go. I’m like, I know I need something where I can just relax and just see how I’m doing. We did an animal trek thing where you interact with a parrot. I held my arm up for the parrot to come over and I couldn’t hold my arm up. So that was immediately MRI, we’re getting an MRI right away.

Then we got the results back and that was it, read the results. They’re like, Okay, this is probably the end of your career, to the point where they handed me mental health paperwork to kind of get that rolling, because I already had the double fusion of my neck. So if we’re talking about another level fusion, because the MRI showed I had another herniated disc in my neck the level above. So two levels, C5,6,7, they’re all fused together. This was C4 and 5, so the one directly above, another fusion would probably be the end of my career. So yeah, they were there preparing me for the worst for when I went to see my surgeon. My surgeon had read the result in the MRI, and he pretty much felt the same way that this was it. So for five days, I think this is it. It’s over with. I flew close to the sun and the wings melted. But when I saw him in Birmingham five days later, and he actually had the disc for the MRI and he read the results for the MRI himself. He’s like, ‘Okay, we can work with this.’ So with my original injury, I did the suicide dive, and my head got pushed back into my disc, exploded into my spinal cord, which caused the temporary paralysis and then pretty much emergency fusion surgery after that. This one, the herniation happened, instead of shooting in towards the cervical cord, it went out away from it. So he was pretty sure, because my symptoms weren’t too bad, we could probably rehab it without having to do surgery. And if we did have to do surgery, he knew a different surgeon who would go in through the back and just shave the herniation down arthroscopically, which wouldn’t require fusion. So he said on multiple occasions that I dodged a very big bullet.”

Ivar on his current quality of life: “So I’m pretty good. To be fair, I do have permanent nerve damage and nerve pain in my hands, and that will never go away. That’s something I live with. But as far as everything else, I got most of my mobility back to my neck. It’s a little stiff now because I have another herniation, but I still have very good range of motion. I credit that to yoga, pretty much. Then all my strength is returned to my arm, so I have no problems there. So it’s really just the nerve pain right now from the original injury that I have that’s permanent. But I have good days and bad days. Some days I can really feel it goes down my arm a little bit, and some days I can’t feel it all, kind of all depends. But quality of life, I feel pretty good.”

On last Monday’s WWE Raw, The War Raiders (Erik and Ivar) were successful over The Judgment Day (Finn Balor and JD McDonagh, winning the WWE World Tag Team Championships.