Adam Copeland on Why He Put Off Retiring, How His AEW Deal Came Together Quickly

– CBS Sports’ Shakiel Mahjouri recently spoke to newly signed AEW star Adam Copeland (formerly Edge in WWE) about his AEW debut at WrestleDream. Below are some highlights:

Adam Copeland on joining AEW as a “full-time” talent: “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 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’m also a realist and I understand that I’m not going to be able to maintain it for a super long time.”

On considering retirement at the end of his WWE contract: “As I got closer to the end of the deal, retirement was a very, very real option. It was not off the table… 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.”

On wanting to top that moment in AEW: “But I guess now it’s like, ‘OK, how can I try and top it in this new environment.’ Honestly, that Toronto show was a send-off 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.”

On working with Christian Cage again in AEW: “If we could end this together, that’s the dream. I sat down with my girls and I’m like, ‘OK, 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 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 on how his AEW deal came together: “It wasn’t until my contract was up on [Sept. 21]. It wasn’t until then. So it was 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 10 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 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.”

On feeling WWE didn’t have a plan in place for him: “I kind of got the sense there wasn’t really a plan [for me in WWE]. 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 10 matches a year. I offered to do more, but to their point, it wouldn’t feel quite as special, which I understood too… 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.

Copeland is set to appear on tomorrow’s edition of AEW Dynamite. He will make his in-ring debut on next week’s Tuesday show on October 10 facing Luchasaurus.