In an interview with Temple-News.com, Nigel McGuinness spoke about his early retirement, which prevented him from going to WWE with fellow ROH alum Daniel Bryan, Seth Rollins and Antonio Cesaro, as well as prematurely ending his TNA run. Here are highlights:
On why he retired: “Ultimately, I stopped wrestling because I had done everything I could do aside from WWE. There wasn’t any interest in me wrestling for them. An old arm injury, which was pretty much healed, is why I couldn’t work for WWE. Then I got hepatitis B in TNA and didn’t want to leave a chance for somebody else to get it.”
On the companies that responded to his plea to stop intentional bleeding in wrestling: “The WWE doesn’t do it, you applaud them for that. ROH has a no-blood policy as well. They’re in the process of getting a testing and/or vaccination protocol worked out through the legal system.”
On how he feels to see his friends working for WWE while he can’t: “It’s tough to see my friends [at WWE] making hundreds of thousands of dollars and really living the life that I worked my whole life for. And I feel, justifiably so, that I unfairly lost the opportunity. But I’ve learned so many skills from working on the documentary, that I can now edit shows and movies and if I have other projects that I want to do, I know on the backend that I can do it all myself. I said to [Colt] Cabana on the end of the tour, really how I view my career will largely depend on what happens after my career. If I continue to have some success in L.A., I may look back and say, you know what? It was the best thing to happen to me.”
