Trent Beretta has said a landing on his head from a Dragon Suplex when performing moves for a video game may have been the start of his neck issues.
The AEW wrestler had neck fusion surgery in the summer of 2021, which sidelined him for around six months.
Appearing on this week’s episode of Talk is Jericho, the 36-year-old said he believed his neck troubles may have begun when he was doing motion capture work for video games.
He talked about the motion capture process:
So you would put on a little suit covered in these little reflective balls and they would have a ring set up. Sometimes, it was big moves they needed and sometimes it was just like standing up and turning slightly to the right and then getting in a fighting position.
He spoke of some of the difficulties involved in the process, due to a lack of warm-up time:
Sometimes it was rough because you’d sit around for hours and then it’d be like, “Okay, we need a guy to take a powerbomb off the top rope.” They’d have a crash pad for stuff like that but sometimes in ring it’d be like, “Just take a Rock Bottom” or something when you’re not warmed up.
Beretta then outlined an incident when he landed on top of his head:
It was on a crash pad. They needed…four moves with a guy on top who slips behind, starting from a fireman’s carry. The guy on top slips behind.
We needed four different moves as reversals, and we’ll use whatever. And somebody said “Dragon Suplex.” Luckily, it was on a crash pad, but it just, the guy — I don’t think it was a guy who did Dragon Suplexes — and he threw it how you would throw a German with a high arc, but he had my neck instead of my waist. So I just landed right on top of my head on a crash pad.
I wasn’t like, “Oh no, I can’t wrestle.” It was just slowly over five or six years, whatever it was, like it started getting worse and worse.
He mentioned that he had suffered from sleep apnea in the lead-up to 2021’s neck fusion surgery.
But after surgery, I guess there was so much extra bone and shit in my neck that, when they cleaned it up, that all went away.
Beretta then mentioned that his relatively quick return to the ring was due to a change in how the surgery is done.
[Dr Michael] Samson was telling me, back in the day, the guys would be out for a year. Apparently, that’s because they would cut through all the muscle in the back of your neck and that’s what really took the most time to heal.
Jericho asked whether the surgery is now done through an incision in the front of the throat.
Yeah, I can barely even see it. It’s just a little hole in the front. They move your throat to the side. It was the easiest surgery I’ve ever had by far, as far as pain.
