Matt Taven Relives His Knee Injury, Talks Being In Kingdom With Mike Bennett
Ring of Honor's Matt Taven was interviewed by Wrestling Epicenter's Interactive Wrestling Radio recently. You can see the full interview above, and select highlights below:
His recovery from his leg injury in late 2015:
"I'm not going to lie. There is good days and bad days. Coming back from major knee surgery is hard on not just your knee but the rest of your body. The alignment of your hips, your back is going to be thrown off. My right knee now is, it had to pick up the slack for so long that now it is starting to hurt. It is a balancing act of going hard at the gym but realizing your knee can only take so much so you have to conserve it and do the proper maintenance. It is probably something I will deal with for the rest of my life, especially the rest of my career. It is so ingrained to be these tough guy wrestlers, I blew my ACL out a minute or two into the match at Final Battle and continued wrestling the next ten minutes. I was doing stuff like my walk up the ropes springboard elbow with no ACL. Obviously continuing to wrestle was probably a mistake because I ended up rupturing one meniscus that had to be surgically removed from the back of my quad, tearing the other meniscus at the same time. That is what makes us wrestlers. We love doing this so much that looking back on it and knowing everything that I know now, I would have been like, "Mike, I don't think I can keep going." But, if I were in the same situation, I probably would keep going 10 times out of 10. Just because, that is the way it is done in wrestling. My first Doctor that I saw after it said it would be 2, 2 and a half years before I could wrestle again which was a pretty scary situation. I look back on it now like it was this fuzzy dream. Like, that happened. But, did that really happen? 9 months out of my life for this? But, here I am back. It is an accomplishment when you sit back and look back on it.
What made his Kingdom with Mike Bennett and Maria Kanellis special:
"I think it is because we had fun. We had a blast doing it. We lived in the moment and enjoyed every second of it. That is kind of what I wanted the next installment of the Kingdom to be. There was a natural chemistry between Mike Bennett, Maria, and myself because we are all friends outside of the ring for years. Man, I've known Mike Bennett since almost day one in wrestling. It is one of those things where it is just so natural – You're just out there with your best friend. I mean, that year with winning the IWGP and ROH World Tag Team Championships and then that ending with Mike leaving and me blowing out my knee, it was like what a way to end that story. (laughs) It really was the genesis of the Matt Taven that you see today."
