‘The Rated-R Superstar’ Edge has speared down rumours that he wanted to make his 2021 Royal Rumble appearance similar to his return the previous year.
After being absent from WWE television for eight months following a torn pectoral muscle which he sustained in a terrific bout with Randy Orton at Backlash 2020, Edge was announced as one of the first two participants in the 2021 Royal Rumble Match prior to the event along with ‘The Viper.’
Entering the bout first for the feel good moment of going coast-to-coast upon victory, Edge outlasted twenty nine other men and some shady tactics to prevail in a near hour-long showing and the right to choose the man and title he challenges for at WrestleMania.
However, in a sit-down interview with ViBe and Wrestling, the former WWE Champion orated that he wanted to make his second comeback different to the first and attempted not to emulate his momentous return from the previous year:
“The Rumble last year was so overwhelming on so many fronts. First of all getting the news that I can do this again. I knew the work that I was putting in, but you still don’t know that work will cause that result that you are hoping for. I am very big on visualization, I believe that if you dream it you can make it happen, and the Rumble was the realization of these dreams that I had and then I had to work to make those dreams come true. When I see that now it almost feels like a decade ago because so much has happened in the interim with the world and what we all have been struggling through, and we are hopefully finding our way through.
We get to WrestleMania and probably it was probably the strangest for me because it was so empty and it was so quiet and it was so unlike anything that I’ve ever experienced in terms of performance especially within the confines of the world of wrestling. That was a weird one, that was hard. I’m so thankful that I had an opponent like Randy Orton because it made what it was fairly an impossible situation seem possible.
Then we get to Backlash, and I am super excited about that. Just to get in and wrestle. That’s all I wanted to do. I just wanted to get back in and exchange wrestling holds and do it with one the best that is ever done it. Didn’t want to get injured, but that’s what happened. Sometime I push myself a little too hard but that’s the way I am wired, I don´t know.
Now here we are, fast forward to this Royal Rumble and I didn’t want to try to recreate last year because it is not possible. We can’t have nine years off again and this comeback story so I thought that it was a good idea to announce that I was going to be in it and kind of state, basically my mission statement as to why Edge is coming back and this is why Edge is coming back to do. So if chapter one of this second half of my book got cut off, well here is where we picked up and is where I wanted to get to and now we are just fast forward into that and now we are trying to make this fairy tail… take it whatever it goes. I am hoping that is compelling television, that’s really the main goal.”
January 31, 2021, didn’t just mark one year since the star’s historic return after a nine year retirement, but also eleven years since his victory in the same bout in 2010.
Edge will now challenge either Drew McIntyre, Roman Reigns or Finn Balor/Pete Dunne for their respective titles at WrestleMania 37 on April 10 or April 11.
Credit for the interview: ViBe and Wrestling
h/t for the transcription: Fightful