Posted on 5/03/125 by Colin Vassallo
Erik of The War Raiders sat down with Chris Van Vliet for
another episode of Insight where he discussed subjects such
as his near-fatal motorbike accident, neck injury, the name
Viking Experience, and Valhalla returning to WWE.
On his near-fatal motorcycle accident:
“So in 2014 actually, just after War Machine started
rolling. He [Ivar] and I spent 11 or 12 years each not
making any money in wrestling, basically both giving up on
making wrestling our career. We get offered Ring of Honor
contracts. We start wrestling. Everything’s starting to go
good. Then like I had done every day for two years, I got on
my motorcycle, went to the gym, left the gym on my way to
get something to eat. A girl was texting at a stop sign and
she just pulled out right in front of my motorcycle. So I
was going about 55 miles an hour, and she was maybe 30 feet
in front of me. I hadn’t even had the conscious decision to
brake, whether I was going to try to brake and turn to miss
her or lay my bike down, I just kind of said, Oh! I didn’t
even get the full word out of my mouth, so I wasn’t even
censoring myself, and I smashed into the back of her car. So
instead of hitting the hood, I had turned and jerked the
wheel and I hit the back seat. So because I had torqued the
handlebars like this, I broke my left thumb. I shattered
everything above my left arm to my elbow to my shoulder.
Then I went up over my handlebars. I punched out her rear
window with my face, lacerated above my eye, broke my nose,
but I didn’t break the cartilage. I broke the bone, the
skull, hit my knee, then I stood up, and my arm was like
wiggling. The girl comes out of the car, and she’s crying.
She’s like, ‘Do you need me to call the ambulance?’ And I
was like, Yes, please. Then the ambulance shows up and they
pull up across the street or across the intersection.”
You’re still standing at this point?
“Yeah, I was. I had sat down at that point, and I just stood
up off the curb, and I started walking to the ambulance. I
remember that I saw the ambulance and the paramedic grabbed
a body bag out of the back, because they just assumed from
the call that I was dead. I walked over and there’s
literally a body bag on the ground. I’m like full Walking
Dead, right? Because my whole face is like gnarled up with
blood and stuff and the paramedic looks at me, and he’s
like, ‘Sir, you’re not supposed to be walking.’ I’m sure I
was in shock at this point, and I was like, ‘Do you want me
to go sit back down?’ He said, ‘No, no, no, you’re already
over here. I just want to stabilize your neck before you do
anything else.’ I was like, okay. He’s like, ‘Unless you
want to walk to the hospital.’ I was like, ‘How far is the
hospital?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s about three miles.’ I was
like, ‘No, I’ll take the ride.’ I’m sure he was teasing me
at that point, but I was in so much shock that I didn’t know
what was going on. Then everybody I talked to after that,
the emergency room docs, the surgeon, all the doctors were
basically like people don’t typically live, because I wasn’t
wearing a helmet.”
“We’ve talked back and forth on whether or not that actually
saved my life or not, and I’m not advocating that you
shouldn’t wear a helmet on a bike. I’m just saying mine, one
in a million chance, because I hit the window with my head
and there’s a chance if I was wearing a helmet it would have
been bigger, and I could have hit the cross guard over the
top of the car. That might have snapped my neck. It might
not have, I don’t know. I know that my dad has always told
me that I give my guardian angel the hardest time, and I
almost outran him that day. But, yeah, he was looking out.
There was a reason that I survived that, and a reason that I
was there. So then the doctors were like, ‘Yeah, dude, you
should be dead. You should have died in the physics of this
accident, usually this is a fatal accident. There’s no way
you’re going to wrestle again, your arm is completely
shattered. It’s destroyed. Everything from the elbow to
shoulder is just destroyed, you’re going to be lucky to lift
weights.’ Six months later I was wrestling again. I had two
plates, 18 pins and screws and, I don’t know, six or seven
hour surgery, putting my arm back together.”
On possibly not returning after his recent neck injury:
“Yeah, absolutely. So I got in a freak accident, I landed a
suplex, I got dropped directly on my head, just one of those
things. I think we kind of say it without really thinking
about it that in wrestling any match could be our last, or
any move could be our last, or whatever. We kind of don’t
think about the weight of that. I was on a live event, non-
televised, just a match that we don’t really think about or
we take for granted. Doing a move, taking a suplex that I
had taken 1000s of times in my career. Didn’t think once
about it. For whatever reason, on that day, I over-rotated
and landed directly in my head. When it happened, I knew I
was hurt, but I didn’t know how bad I was hurt. I thought it
was something that was in my trap, and everything kind of
locked up. So I was treating it muscular. It got worse.
We got MRIs, saw there was herniation in the disc. I kept
wrestling, because I was like, well we can just keep
treating this with PT. I was talking with doctors. I was
doing PT like 3, 4, 5, times a week. I was getting dry
needling, scraping, everything, trying to mitigate all the
stuff I was doing. I was doing electric therapy and stuff
like that, trying to stimulate the nerves, trying to doing
everything I could to avoid surgery. But at the same time, I
was wrestling every single week, I didn’t miss a match. Then
I took another bad fall, just got tumbled up going over the
ropes one time and it actually didn’t even hit my neck. I
hit my elbow on the apron on the way over, and then three
days later, my tricep disappeared, my right lat shrank half
in size, and then my right pec flattened within days. I came
in, and I was terrified. So I came into work that week, and
we were scheduled for a match, actually against New Day.
Ironically enough, we were scheduled to wrestle The New Day.
I sat down with medical, I sat down with Triple H and
everybody, the consensus was, ‘Hey, you’re going to
Birmingham tomorrow. You’re not flying home, cancel plans.
We’re flying you from TV to Birmingham.’ I saw Dr Cordover.
We did try a nerve block thing, because he was like, hey,
maybe we can reverse some of this. So we tried that before
cutting and then that didn’t have the effect that anyone
wanted. So we did neck surgery but it was immediate, it was
fast. It was like, bang, bang, bang.”
That sounds scary.
“It was. They’re going through the front now. So it’s ACDF
surgery. It’s at level six, seven. Ivar’s got two levels. So
his is actually the one above and mine, but our symptoms are
totally different, even down to the fingers, our nerve
pathway. The way that my nerve pathway was affected was
totally different than his. So it’s funny that we both have
surgically repaired necks, but our injuries couldn’t be more
separate. But yeah, I’ve always been a fast healer. After
the motorcycle wreck I was back in six months, so in my
brain I was like, I’ll be back in six months. I’ve done this
before, it’s fine. Six months came, I went for the scan,
still didn’t have full fusion, seven months no fusion, eight
months no fusion, nine months no fusion. Now I’m getting
scared. What happens if this doesn’t fully fuse? What is
life without wrestling? How does this go on? Then, thank
God, finally it did fuse. We showed full fusion, I was able
to start training again, get back really quickly. But then
it ended up being 13 months, I think, from surgery that I
was out. There were definitely some times of this might be
the end. So I was thinking, I’m texting with Ivar, and
talking to my wife every day, how do we go from here? What
happens now? So it’s sobering to be struck there. So, then
having the motorcycle wreck, then having the neck surgery.
There’s all of this like Hey, dude, don’t take anything for
granted. Not a single flight, not a single match, not a
single move, not a single day.”
On The Viking Experience:
“Our first day on the main roster. We had never actually
physically met Vince McMahon, but we went and stood outside
his office to go and plead our case. Because I was ringside,
this is fun. I was ringside, and I see our music starts
playing, and it’s ‘The War Raiders’ up on the screen, and
then the logo changes, and ‘Berserkerz’ comes up. Now I’m
looking like, oh man. Then that goes away, and ‘The Viking
Experience’ comes up. I look and I’m like, Oh no! So I walk
up and Hunter was actually ringside, he’s texting, and I
walk up to him and I was like, ‘Hey, dude, is this a rib?’
He just shakes his head and goes, ‘I wish.’ I’m like, ‘What
do we do?’ He’s like, ‘Well, you gotta go talk to Vince.’
All right, cool. So Ivar’s plane was late, he gets to the
building, I tell him, ‘We got to go talk to Vince. This is
bad.’ So we go get in line, we stand, we make our case.
Said, Viking Experience sounds like a Disney ride, it sounds
something like a small world, the tea cups and all that
stuff. The Viking Experience, bring your kids, right?
So, we pitched that case, and Vince was like, ‘Well, that
makes sense, but we don’t have time to get that through
legal.’ Because we asked to be Viking Raiders because we
heard, a little birdie told us, when we changed from War
Machine to War Raiders they were really stuck on Raiders. So
all of the names had Raiders in them. This time, Vince was
really stuck on us being Vikings. He loved Vikings. Little
known fact, Vince was a big fan of the history show Vikings,
which is probably why we got called up in the first place,
because he was like, ‘Hey, we got Vikings on TV? Bring them
up!’ So he wanted us to be the Viking something, right? And
the problem is, Vikings are a very popular thing in culture
right now. So nothing could get past legal, nothing could
get trademarked, nothing could get whatever. Viking
Experience was shockingly free, because no one wanted to be
that, including us.
So we asked to be Viking Raiders. By this point, it’s like,
7:30. The show’s going on at 8. He was like, ‘Well, we can’t
get this cleared through legal at this point. So what we’ll
do is, you’ll be the Viking Experience today, and if we
really don’t like it, then we’ll be Viking Raiders next
week. No press is bad press. So worst case scenario, people
will talk. They’ll be talking about you.’ So we’re like,
okay, and as we’re leaving the office, kind of in an
afterthought, he goes, ‘Oh and by the way, one of you is
Ivar, and one of you is Erik, I don’t care who.’ We just
walked out. I looked and we were maybe two steps outside of
his office, Ivar grabs my arm for real, and he’s like,
‘Please don’t make me be Erik. My brother’s name is Erik.’
The bully in my brain for like, three seconds, I was like
man, I really should be mean. No, okay, fine, you could be
Ivar. But it was close to us being the other way. I was like
I don’t know how they came up with these names. Someone in
creative might have just Googled famous Viking names or
something. Because I did that afterwards, trying to figure
out where they come up with these names. The first one was
Erik the Red. Then it was Ivar the Boneless. I was like, Oh,
cool. So it’s literally just Erik, Ivar. ‘You guys are
Vikings?’ Eric and Ivar.”