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Posts Tagged ‘Adam Copeland’

Adam Copeland, better known as Edge to WWE fans, is taking the advice of fellow pro wrestling retiree Stone Cold Steve Austin. The Texas Rattlesnake has advised Edge to ease into retirement, rather than going off the grid completely.

While he was still selling plenty of funny tee shirts right up through his retirement, Edge was forced to retire when he found out further trauma to his neck could prove fatal. Yet after his post-Wrestlemania tour, Edge stayed busy by becoming a regular cast member of SyFy’s Stephen King-inspired horror series, HAVEN.

Now pressure is on Edge to return to WWE to promote his role on the show, as a RAW guest host or some similar non-wrestling capacity. Apparently, he’s not quite ready for that, but will appear off-screen at Summerslam’s Axxess fan appreciation event.

WWE wrestler Edge (Adam Copeland) was showing his cocoa butter stretch mark when he was interviewed by the Asheville, NC Citizen-Times recently, and revealed that he and his current girlfriend have a place in Asheville and plan to “settle down” there sooner than later.

Copeland has been in wrestling, according to the interview, for nearly 20 years. He must be counting from the time he began training and appearing on the indy scene, because Edge wrestled his first WWE match in 1996, signed his first WWE developmental contract in 1997 and began competing for the company in 1998. That means that as of 2010, Edge’s WWE career has spanned a mere 14 years at best.

Still, Edge has suffered some career-shortening injuries and at age 36, he isn’t getting any younger. His indy debut was in 1992, according to Wikipedia, so if he retired in 2012, he will indeed have completed two decades in the business. Here’s a quote from the interview:

“I’m coming up on my 20th year, and I’ve definitely had some injuries that have shortened my career,” Edge said. “That’s part of the reason I bought up here – we want to retire and listen to the wind in the trees, and we want to do it fairly soon. I may have two more years. With each injury, it’s harder and harder to come back.”

Edge is still considered young by industry vets like Undertaker and Kane, so this interview makes it all the more apparent that WWE needs to continue to emphasize the development of the next generation of stars; much like Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock and Mick Foley nearly a decade ago, WWE will face a crisis if the next generation isn’t ready to step forward when folks like Edge start calling it quits.

Of course, pro wrestling retirements rarely last forever; but once a superstar begins to wind down, so does his ability to draw. Time for Ted DiBiase Jr., Sheamus, Cody Rhodes and the like to step up and prove the WWE will be in good hands two to five years from now, just as Edge and Christian and even John Cena did when Austin, Rock and Foley were winding down.

Looking to change his image, Adam Copeland, who wrestles under the name Edge, debuted his new look on Smackdown this past Friday. Sporting a full beard and mustache, and a shorter, less-glam-rock hairstyle, Edge ended up looking like a cross between Triple H and Big John Studd.

A little acne treatment might have been a bigger help. Don’t count me as a fan of Edge’s new look; his old look made him stand out from the crowd while the new hairstyle does nothing but help him blend into the crowd. Big thumbs down.