AEW's Ricky Starks Thought Neck Injury Could Have Been Career Ending

Team Taz’s Ricky Starks is in a good place on AEW television. Part of a featured feud with former running mate Brian Cage, Absolute is the holder of the FTW Title, capturing it not long after returning from a fractured neck.

Starks fractured his neck during a match with Adam Page back in April, and during an appearance on Busted Open Radio, Starks admitted he thought it could have been the end of his in-ring career:

“Man, I’m still a little p***** off about the injury to be straight up with you and nobody can tell me different about that until I’m ready to let go of that, deal with it the way I want to but, I did have the thought of, you know, when it happened, ‘Yeah, this is pretty much - this is the down - this is where it goes downhill’ because I’ve gone to school for physical therapy and I know an injury to the neck is a huge deal because when you have an injury like that, especially to the neck, pretty much everything else starts to follow. You start to have issues in other places and whatnot and I’m not saying that you can’t come back from neck injury but for a person, for 11 years who never had an injury, ever, ever in my career, to have a neck injury, the worst ideas came into my head in that this was pretty much it.

“So I did think that I wasn’t gonna be the same and maybe the in-ring career was kind of over and then once I allowed myself to deal with that and those feelings, I sat down, came up with a game plan and said, ‘Nah, you know what? I didn’t come this far to be like well, this is it.’ So, yeah, it did cross my mind but, being as stubborn as I am, I wasn’t just gonna sit back and be like, ‘Well, this is the cards I was dealt,’ you know what I’m saying? I was gonna reshuffle ‘em either way.”

H/T: POST Wrestling