The former IMPACT World Champion speaks about injuries he’s dealt with over the past several years.
It was in the summer of 2021 that Steve Maclin signed a contract with IMPACT Wrestling. Maclin most recently competed in the Feast or Fired match at IMPACT 1000 and had a singles bout against Josh Alexander at Victory Road.
In August, Maclin returned from a groin injury he suffered during IMPACT’s tour of Australia. While guest appearing on Cody Deaner’s ‘Wrestling is Life is Wrestling’ podcast, Maclin spoke about the injury in detail and also shared that during his first year with the company, he suffered a torn labrum in his right shoulder and never got it fixed.
So actually, the first year at IMPACT, I tore my labrum, never got it fixed. I just worked through it. Tore my labrum in my right shoulder. That’s just the business. You find a way to work around injuries and I gotta put food on the table. I can’t be out right now and this (partial groin tear) was one of those injuries that kept me — I hated it. I’m glad you (Deaner) got to step up for Slams so thank you (Maclin smiled).
Circling back to the groin injury, it happened as Maclin and Alex Shelley were competing for the IMPACT World Championship in June. As a result of Maclin being injured, he was pulled from the Slammiversary pay-per-view. Maclin went for a bicycle knee and stated that he felt something crunch.
Initially, he thought he had a cramp or maybe he was dehydrated. He tried to get back to the match but could not continue because of the pain. Maclin was diagnosed with a partially torn groin.
Getting hurt sucks. It’s one of those things in this business that just happens and to go to Australia, for me and (Alex) Shelley to go there and we’re about 22 minutes into the match and to be hurt… You know when you’re in a match… In the beginning, it’s slow and you’re listening to the people and you’re just like, ah, are they tired? Where are they at? Then we started moving and then we started getting into some kind of contact and I’m like, oh, oh, okay, cool and then once we started hitting falsies and I’m just like, we kind of got ‘em. We got ‘em here and we started cooking and then of course, as soon as you start cooking, I hit that bicycle knee, I landed and just from my knee all the way from my abdomen, something crunched. I don’t know what it was and it just felt like somebody kicked me in the balls so hard. But I couldn’t sit up, I couldn’t move and then I hit and then Shelley was like, ‘Are you okay?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. Just stay there and give me a minute.’ I went to go pick him up. As I went to go pick him up, I was like, nope! Nope! Nope! Put him back down. I was like, ‘Just stay there for a second. Maybe it’s a cramp,’ I was dehydrated, maybe from sitting on a plane too long. I don’t know, and then as I went to go get up, I just was like, nope, we’re going home. Sorry brother. Something’s really wrong, and that’s also, again, getting back to fundamentals of wrestling, something goes wrong, get to the finish. Nobody knew, nobody in the fans knew. Obviously when rolling out, it’s a flat finish obviously but, we got to where we needed to get to. But, I remember getting to the back, I was like, ‘Sh*t!’ and Scott’s like, ‘Are you okay?’ I’m like, I can’t crunch, I had to stand the whole time. But, I got diagnosed with a partial groin tear. It was like a grade 2 sprain but a partial tear in my groin. A lot of my junk was black and blue. So that was a very odd thing to see. So I’m just like, ‘Yeah, what is going on?’ What made it worse was after the spray tan was rubbing off, that’s when I started seeing more coloring of different — like the yellow or the bruising. I’m just like, ‘Oh! This is awful.’ D’s like, ‘You okay?’ I’m like, ‘No.’ Talk about an appointment at home from hell.
There is going to be coverage of the 9/28 IMPACT on AXS here on POST Wrestling. The company is presenting their Bound For Glory pay-per-view in October and following that, they’ll be touring the United Kingdom.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit ‘Wrestling is Life is Wrestling’ with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
