She initially suffered the injury in NXT.
Steph De Lander is back in TNA Wrestling and she recognizes herself as the co-Digital Media Champion. She is paired on-screen with her real-life significant other Mance Warner and he defends the belt while De Lander is not able to.
She underwent neck surgery and is currently not cleared to compete. She spoke about the severity of her injury while doing an interview with the Battleground Podcast.
De Lander had been wrestling with a bulging disc in her neck for the last three years and she shared that she initially suffered the injury in NXT.
Yeah, I’m definitely very ahead of my recovery timeline which is really cool. I’m very happy about that. I mean, as far as how it’s influenced how I’m gonna wrestle when I come back… what I will say is I initially injured myself like three years ago when I was at WWE. Which no one knew the whole time that I’ve been working with this bulging disc in my neck. I would quietly tell my opponents when they wanted to give me piledrivers, like, ‘Hey, I’m not taking a piledriver. I have a neck injury’ but, for the most part, I just kept it under wraps and I worked through it. So, I’ve had this in my head for years of I need to wrestle as safely as I can because I wanna do this for decades. I don’t wanna do this for a few years and then my body gives up, you know? So, I’ve already taken steps where the last few years — I’ve taken one piledriver in my entire career and I’m never gonna take another one ever again. I stopped taking German suplexes. The only person I would let German me was Jordynne Grace. No else is allowed to give me a high neck bump. There’s certain movements that in my opinion, the risk just isn’t worth the reward and I did run into that a lot more on the indies than you do on TV because TV, you have producers and people saying no to things whereas on the indies, everyone can do whatever they want and they do that. So I had to be the bad guy a lot of the time and just say, ‘I’m not doing that. That’s stupid.’ But then moving forward, there’s a couple of movements that I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze anymore and I’m speaking to my surgeon, like I had a conversation with my surgeon… the other day I was like, ‘So these are the moves that I do and are there any of these that you think it’s not really worth it right now?’ And he was like, ‘Ehh, if you wanna wrestle for another 10 to 20 years, maybe you don’t need to do a spear every single match or maybe you don’t need to be catching a full body weight on your shoulders, you know? Maybe there’s another way you can get around it.’ But the cool thing about wrestling is you can modify what you do, right? If you play football, you have to do every movement whereas if you wrestle, I can choose what moves I wanna do, what moves I wanna take out, what I can come up with instead so, yeah, it’ll take a little bit of time of workshopping my moveset of what I want the new rendition of my in-ring to be but, this isn’t a new thing for me. As I said, I’ve had a neck injury for the last few years so I’ve definitely already been thinking safely for a while.
TNA is presenting a live edition of their weekly show on 2/20 from Full Sail University. There is going to be coverage here on POST Wrestling.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit the Battleground Podcast with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
