William Regal has made it known that while he can still wrestle as good as he ever has, that doesn’t mean he will step back into the ring again.
He spoke about his reasons for staying in retirement during an interview with Metro’s Alistair McGeorge.
“No, never. No. My last official match was against Cesaro. My last few years, I didn’t realize – it’s come out recently, I had a serious neck problem for 20-odd years. It finally caught up with me. All I ever wanted was a 20-year wrestling career when I started – I ended up with a 30-year wrestling career. I couldn’t have asked for any more. If you’re not me and you’re just looking from the outside, ‘Oh he should have been this, he should have been that’ – no. I was very happy with what I achieved. If I’d have never come to America, I had an incredible career. By the time I was 24, I’d been to 19 countries. In 20 to 24, I’d been to all the best places you could go to, wrestling all the best wrestling.”
As for why he won’t come back, Regal stated that he looks his age and doesn’t want fans to remember him as that, but rather when he was active full-time.
“I can get in the ring now and wrestle just as good as I ever did. In fact people are like, ‘You wanna stop a bit.’ Training, I can get in there and do that. I still train, do all my squats and push-ups that I never thought I’d be able to do. But I look like a 54 year old. I don’t want the memories of me – I can still wrestle just as good as I used to. In fact, better because I’ve got full circulation now after god knows how many years. I wrestled my son for an hour before Christmas in the PC in Orlando. I can wrestle. I’d rather that match with Cesaro be my final thing. ‘Elvis has left the building.’ That’s why Colonel Tom Parker never let Elvis do an encore. Don’t ruin it for myself. That was as good as a match as it could ever be for me to finish my career, and 30 years in, it’s somebody else’s turn now. Why ruin it?”
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