A video that former WWE star Matt Cardona posted to his YouTube channel looked back on his career as a wrestler in 2024.
Cardona said, “It’s been a wild year, celebrating 20 years in the business, 20 years since my first match, four years since I was fired from WWE. Now, I’m just coming back from injury. The doctors said six to eight months, I did it in four. Time is not on my side. I’m not getting any younger, but I feel like right now, I haven’t even hit the prime of my career. I feel like my best years are ahead of me. I’ve done it all on the indies. Winning titles, cover of magazines, all over the world, and it’s been fun, and I needed it, I needed to find myself, both as a performer and as a man. I did, I did it all. The time is now to go back. Where do I go? Do I go back to WWE? Do I go to AEW? Just having that taste even, earlier this year, wrestling Adam Copeland [on AEW Collision], just being out there, jam-packed, real arena, not the Ukrainian Cultural Center in LA or The Showboat Hotel in Atlantic City, a real arena, and the crowd responded, just on my entrance. It made me feel like, ‘Okay, everything I’ve been doing, it’s working.’”
“I didn’t dream as a little kid to just be a pro wrestler. I dreamed of being a top guy, the top guy. You have to have that goal to be successful in this business. I’m very fortunate in my career, 20 years, highs and lows. But I never got the big one. I never won the WWE World Title. That has to be the goal. Because if that’s not the goal, what are we doing? What am I doing here? What am I working towards? I might never achieve that goal, but I’m gonna die trying. I love the indies, I love everything about it. There are days, and we had a great show, made a lot of money on merch, and I’m thinking, ‘This is fucking awesome, I can do this forever. Then there are days where I’m like, ‘What the fuck am I doing with my life?’ When I’m at fucking GCW in LA and the locker room is a fucking alley, or if I’m in the middle of nowhere, I do the show, I don’t get a fucking tweet about it. Did this day exist in my life? It’s not just like, ‘I want to be back there.’ Everyone wants to be back there. But I know if I was back, I’d make a f*cking difference.”
You can check out the video below:
(quotes courtesy of Colin Tessier)
