WZ Feature: Mr. Kennedy Talks Orton Incident & His Release

On the whole idea that he’s “injury prone”:

Anderson: “If I come up to you and whack you in the knee with a baseball bat, that doesn’t make you injury prone.  I’m an asshole for doing it to you.  If that happens more than once, is that still your fault or is it…you know what I’m saying? 

Two of those injuries were…well, the first one I was in Italy on the third day of a European tour standing on the apron expecting..just trying to hold on to the rope loosely in the middle of a 10 man tag..and this performer who will remain nameless was supposed to come over and just give me a little forearm and I was just gonna kind of fall off the apron, sell it for a little bit and then slide back in the ring and got into the finishing sequence.  Instead, he came up and jumped and gave me one of those dropkicks where he then lands on his back.  He was so close to me that he literally leg-pressed me off of the apron and because I wasn’t waiting for the little flipper, he jumps up and when he kicked me, I literally flew backwards through the air, I missed the mat surrounding the ring and almost end my head on the guardrail, landed on the concrete between the guardrail and the mat.



Now, does that make me injury prone or is that somebody else’s stupidity? I don’t know.

And then, the second one was just a fluke. But the second one I was only gone for two months.  I’m sorry, but ten years in the wrestling business, I’m 33 years old, sometimes you’re going to get hurt.  It’s just a fact of this business, especially when you’re wrestling as much as we do, you know?  We’re on the road four days a week when you’re with the WWE, 52 weeks a year. 

And then another one of those injuries, I was expecting a roll-up finish and the guy hit me with his finisher instead.  He was told specifically on several occasions not to hit me with the finisher, just to give me a nice little roll-up and he decided without even calling an audible or anything like that, he just hit me with it. He just jumped up and my arm got caught between us and went from standing to laying on my arm which popped it out of its socket and that one cost me ten months. 

But the thing is I never blamed any of those guys for that.  I never pointed any fingers…and I sat back and watched everybody go ‘Oh, he’s injury prone’ and just bit my lip and bit my tongue and didn’t say a thing.  And that I think aided my detractors inside the company to say ‘Hey, people are saying he’s injury prone, let’s run with this thing and then let’s add to it and say he’s prone to injuring others. That will really get him’.”

On the incident during and after the match on Raw with Randy Orton:

Anderson: “Before we went out there, [Randy] said ‘No matter where we are, I’ll put you in a rear chin lock when they tell us to go home, give me a belly-to-back suplex and we’ll go home’.   So, came time for the match, he puts me in the rear chin lock and he goes ‘Do it now’ and I picked him up, dropped him, and made my tag, finish went down, went to the back and Randy was in the gorilla position holding his neck saying that I dropped him on his head.

Okay, well I haven’t seen the video tape, so I don’t know.  If somebody tells me that I dropped them on their head, you know, I’m going to feel bad about it.  That’s the last thing I want to do.  Besides that, here I am coming back from being gone for ten months, your worst fears are kind of recognized.  You always wonder am I going to remember how to wrestle or am I going to be rusty.  So, we continue to go back to the trainer’s room and Randy’s getting checked over by the trainer and everything and he gets big bags of ice put on his shoulders and his neck and everything and he’s walking all hunched over…I mean, walking like he literally got his neck broken.  I’m very nervous for his health and also why this really looks bad for me.

So, I went back to my hotel room, got a little bit of sleep that night..not much..got on the plane early the next morning, went straight home and…reverse a little bit…he also lectured me for about 30 minutes on how to properly take care of somebody, you know, like it was my first day stepping foot in a ring.  And this took place in his private dressing room, by the way…the next day I go home and the first thing I did was run upstairs and check my DVR which is in HD and I fast-forward, rewound, and paused, and slow-mo’d probably about 20 or 25 times and you can see clearly that he lands as flat as you can possibly land.  He lands a little sideways, a little crooked.  His head was facing rampside rather than straight back opposite hard-cam, but his neck…and you can see on the video…his neck never even comes into contact with the mat, which makes me question why he then would go back and get his neck iced up.  I mean it didn’t make any sense to me.  Or his shoulders. 

So, I mean…I don’t know, if you see the video, it’s plain as day.  And I talked to somebody else within the company, actually a couple other people, who said that there were similar situations many, many, many years ago where somebody said ‘Hey, this guy hurt me’ and caused a tremendous deal of heat for that person backstage and when the video was reviewed, oh, lo and behold, that never happened. 

You know what, anyone can speculate all they want.  It’s not going to change anything, so I would just assume move forward and deal with positive things in my life.”

BE SURE TO CHECK OUT PART TWO ON THURSDAY EXCLUSIVELY HERE ON WRESTLEZONE.COM