Tommaso Ciampa Felt He Would Never Wrestle Again After Injury

Tommaso Ciampa was certainly one of the best things about NXT throughout his run in the developmental brand. He was part of solid feuds, especially with his eternal friend/rival Johnny Gargano. Ciampa came back to the squared circle last month, but it appears Ciampa felt he would never wrestle again due to his numerous injuries.

Ciampa was in the middle of building his momentum on Monday Night RAW when a nagging injury forced him to take a break from in-ring competition. The former NXT Champion had successful surgery in October 2022.

After several months of absence, the Sicilian Psychopath returned to Monday Night RAW last month and immediately began feuding with The Miz. That said, there was a lot of uncertainty in his return.

While speaking on Out of Character with Ryan Satin, Tommaso Ciampa talked about the injuries that kept him out of action for so long. Ciampa stated that he felt he would never wrestle again.

So it’s awesome when you don’t have to wrestle. The concern of course is when you have to wrestle and you’re like, oh crap (Ciampa responded when asked how he’s feels coming back from surgery). So it’s always hard to answer because I feel 100 percent. If I never had to wrestle again, I’d feel like, oh yeah, I’m gonna live a good, healthy life. You enter the bumping, the traveling, flights, car rides, it’s too early for me to say.

I’ve only had one match since I’ve come back and it’s probably 100 percent as far as scientifically healed. But, I have no idea what it’s gonna do when I start to test it. I did stem cells too when I was (out) and the results of that have been great, so I’m really hoping that, knock on wood, knock on something, I’ve had some bad injury luck in my career so I’m really hoping that it’s behind me and I just get a nice, solid run here of being in the company. That’d be really nice.

So, somewhere around the start of 2.0, what would happen is I would take any forward bump or a powerslam, a suplex, anything where I flipped and landed and I would get this thing where I would bump and then my left side, my glute, my hamstring, it’s hard to even explain. It felt like something that wrapped around my lower back through the groin and stuff, would just kind of go numb and weak. I wouldn’t be able to stand on my left foot at all. But then it would go, it’d be temporary. It’d stay for 20 seconds or so, back pain, you’d breathe through it, you wiggle out of the ring or something and I would carry on. With the NXT 2.0 schedule, especially coming off the pandemic and everything, it was a light schedule so say that happened in a match on a Tuesday, I might not have a match the next Tuesday and I get two weeks of rest.

I almost wouldn’t even think about it and then it would happen again. That was happening fairly often. Not enough for me to be alarmed and then when I started to go on the road and started to take on that full-time schedule and do the live events and stuff, it just got to the point where I was like, oh crap, this happened Saturday, Sunday, Monday and that pain’s worse and worse and worse and it finally got to a point where we were on a live event and we’d tried a lot at this point. I’d gotten some injections, I’d done a lot of treatments and it just happened, I don’t know, two or three times in one match and I just remember the last one, it was a suplex, I wanna say off the second, not even off the top and when it landed, you know that peel of light, I think I wanna throw up.

The exact feeling I had when I tore my ACL and I just kept thinking to myself, you just have to get up for a spear. It’s all you have to do and just finish it but that ended up, you know, being the last time I was in a ring and that’s some time in September of last year and then when I finally went to go get it fixed, so much was wrong. I had bulging discs in my back, SI joint was closed off, hip labrum was torn to shreds, a bone was rubbing up against something. It was just a mess.

The MRI had a lot of language in it I didn’t understand. So the surgery and the rehab wasn’t very fun, I won’t lie. It was kind of miserable at points. When I went out to Columbia, I was honestly at a point where I was like, holy crap. A little bit depressed, a little bit like I might’ve had my last match and it was in whatever town at a live event, not how I envisioned it being. So the stem cells really, really were a game changer. Working with the PTs down at the Performance Center just really educated myself about like, at 38 years old, how you have to kind of change up your methods, your training, mobility and it was a freaking mess man. It was not a fun time at all. The saving grace was being home with the little one and my wife, great support system but, it was rough.

Tommaso Ciampa is currently feuding with Bronson Reed after the latter cost him his match against The Miz. We will have to wait and see whether WWE will have anything substantial planned for the Sicilian Psychopath eventually.

What’s your view on what Tommaso Ciampa said? Are you glad he is finally back on WWE television? Let us know in the comments!