At AEW WrestleDream, a new era began for the promotion and WWE Hall of Fame inductee Edge, as Adam Copeland debuted following the main event. As his long-time friend Christian Cage stood over a downed Sting, Copeland’s music hit, receiving a thunderous reaction. Once in the ring, The Rated R Superstar wasted no time shedding allegiance to his long-time tag team partner, laying out his new apprentice, Nick Wayne, and muscle, Luchasaurus. He will face the latter of the two in his debut AEW match next week on a special Title Tuesday episode of Dynamite.
In an interview with CBS Sports, Copeland addressed whether his AEW run will be his last as a full-time performer.
“I think that’s a very safe thing to say because I know how much work it’s going to take to be able to pull it off,” he confirmed. “I know that. I’m not in any way trying to fool myself into thinking I’m just going to trot through this whole thing. It’s not going to be that. I know what it’s going to be.
“It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be a lot of hard work. I enjoy hard work. I always have. It’s how I’m wired. It’s what I was born with. It’s in my DNA. So that’s super fun. But I also I’m a realist, and I understand that I’m not going to be able to maintain it for a super long time. I’d say that’s a very fair, very fair, safe bet.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Copeland reflected on his waning days in WWE before making his big leap to the competition. His final match for the sports entertainment juggernaut took place on the August 18 episode of Friday Night SmackDown, losing to Sheamus.
“I kind of got the sense there wasn’t really a plan. I get it because what else do we do? What else is there to do? And after 25 years, I’ve literally done everything there. So what do we do? It wasn’t anybody’s fault… I was coming up against creative walls, too. I was having a hard time coming up with ideas, and that’s not usually the case. I think they were, too.
“There was also the conundrum that I was contracted for ten matches a year,” he said. “I offered to do more, but to their point, it wouldn’t feel quite as special, which I understood too. So there was a weird kind of conundrum, right? It just felt like neither one of us really had any ideas, and that’s never been the case before. So when you look at that, and then I look at my best friend over there having the time of his life, at a certain point, once I thought, ‘You know what, I still have a window here where I can do this, and I don’t feel like I’m maximizing that.’
“I think that was really what it boiled down to. I want to try and maximize what I still have left. If that’s one year, if that’s two years, I want to do it as much as I can while I still feel like I can. I know that’s going to be hard, and I know that’s going to take a lot of work physically. I know there’s a different fallout now, but I know all of those things, and I really just want to weigh the glory of this thing as much as I can.”
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