During his appearance on the most recent episode of Insights with Chris Van Vliet, Erik of WWE’s War Raiders talked on his new lease on life after his near fatal motorcycle accident and if Valhalla will return to WWE anytime soon.
On the motorcycle accident in 2014:
“So in 2014 actually, just after War Machine started rolling. He and I spent 11 or 12 years each not making any money in wrestling, basically both giving up on making wrestling our career. We get offered Ring of Honor contracts. We start wrestling. Everything’s starting to go good. Then like I had done every day for two years, I got on my motorcycle, went to the gym, left the gym on my way to get something to eat. A girl was texting at a stop sign and she just pulled out right in front of my motorcycle. So I was going about 55 miles an hour, and she was maybe 30 feet in front of me, maybe. I hadn’t even had the conscious decision to brake, whether I was going to try to brake and turn to miss her or lay my bike down, I just kind of said, Oh. I didn’t even get the full word out of my mouth, so I wasn’t even censoring myself, and I smashed into the back of her car. So instead of hitting the hood, I had turned and jerked the wheel and I hit the back seat. So because I had torqued the handlebars like this, I broke my left thumb. I shattered everything above my left arm to my elbow to my shoulder. Then I went up over my handlebars. I punched out her rear window with my face, lacerated above my eye, broke my nose, but I didn’t break the cartilage. I broke the bone, the skull, hit my knee, and then I stood up, and my arm was like wiggling. The girl comes out of the car, and she’s crying. She’s like, do you need me to call the ambulance? And I was like, Yes, please. Then the ambulance shows up and they pull up across the street or across the intersection.”
Being able to stand just after the accident:
“Yeah, I was. I had sat down at that point, and I just stood up off the off the curb, and I started walking to the ambulance. I remember that I saw the ambulance and the paramedic grabbed a body bag out of the back, because they just assumed from the call that I was dead. I walked over and there’s literally a body bag on the ground. I’m like full Walking Dead, right? Because my whole face is like gnarled up with blood and stuff and the paramedic looks at me, and he’s like, ‘Sir, you’re not supposed to be walking.’ I’m sure I was in shock at this point, and I was like, ‘Do you want me to go sit back down?’ He said, ‘No, no, no, you’re already over here. I just want to stabilize your neck before you do anything else.’ I was like, okay. He’s like, ‘Unless you want to walk to the hospital.’ I was like, ‘How far is the hospital?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s about three miles.’ And I was like, No, I’ll take the ride. I’m sure he was teasing me at that point, but I was in so much shock that I didn’t know what was going on. Then everybody I talked to after that, the emergency room docs, the surgeon, all the doctors were basically like people don’t typically live, because I wasn’t wearing a helmet.”
“We’ve talked back and forth on whether or not that actually saved my life or not, and I’m not advocating that you shouldn’t wear a helmet on a bike. I’m just saying mine one in a million chance, because I hit the window with my head, and there’s a chance if I was wearing a helmet, it would have been bigger, and I could have hit the cross guard over the top of the car, that might have snapped my neck. It might not have, I don’t know. I know that my dad has always told me that I give my guardian angel the hardest time, and I almost outran him that day. But, yeah, he was looking out. There was a reason that I survived that, and a reason that I was there. So then the doctors were like, ‘Yeah, dude, you should be dead. You should have died in the physics of this accident, usually this is a fatal accident. There’s no way you’re going to wrestle again, your arm is completely shattered. It’s destroyed. Everything from the elbow to shoulder is just destroyed, you’re going to be lucky to lift weights.’ Six months later I was wrestling again. I had two plates, 18 pins and screws and, I don’t know, six or seven hour surgery, putting my arm back together.”
On having a new lease on life after the accident:
“In a way, I was like, I’ve wasted so much time. There’s so many stupid decisions, or I’ve worried about so many things that don’t truly matter. I’ve let so much time waste, and I felt that I couldn’t do that anymore. I felt like I had been given this second chance on life, literally, where it was like, I don’t want to waste any more time. I don’t want to take anything for granted. I definitely hug people more and was a lot more thankful and grateful. Because to have a doctor tell you should have died, not, hey you’re real lucky, or this could have been bad. He was like, Yeah, dude, I can’t explain why you’re alive.”
On the rumor that The Beserkers was a scrapped tag team name:
“Not until the main roster. So from War Machine to War Raiders, the initial one was Doomsday Raiders. We were like oof. Okay, could we give you some ideas? So Ivar and I went and we talked about a bunch of stuff, we probably gave 50 names back. Then someone told us they really want to put raiders in the name. So we came up with 50 names with raiders in them, and the number one on our list was actually Viking Raiders. We’re like, ‘Hey, this is a name that we like. It kind of fits who we are, the look we’ve got, the energy we’ve got, I like this name.’ So we sent it up and I think it was Hunter who was like, ‘We’re kind of thinking War Raiders.’ I was like, well, let’s give you some different ideas. He said, ‘Yeah, but we really like War Raiders.’ And we’re like, yeah War Raiders is the coolest name we’ve ever heard. So then we became the War Raiders. Then we were War Raiders in all of NXT, we liked the name, and then we got called up. We were the Viking Experience.
Our first day on the main roster. We had never actually physically met Vince McMahon, but we went and stood outside his office to go and plead our case. Because I was ringside, this is fun, I was ringside, and I see our music starts playing, and it’s The War Raiders up on the screen, and then the logo changes, and Berserkers comes up. Now I’m looking like, oh man. Then that goes away, and the Viking Experience comes up. I look and I’m like, Oh no! So I walk up and Hunter was actually ringside, he’s texting, and I walk up to him and I was like, ‘Hey, dude, is this a rib?’ He just shakes his head and goes, ‘I wish.’ I’m like, ‘What do we do?’ He’s like, ‘Well, you gotta go talk to Vince.’ All right, cool. So Ivar’s plane was late, he gets to the building, I tell him we got to go talk to Vince. This is bad, right? So we go get in line, stand, we make our case. Said, Viking Experience sounds like a Disney ride, it sounds something like a small world, the tea cups and all that stuff. The Viking Experience, bring your kids, right?
So, we pitched that case, and Vince was like, ‘Well, that makes sense, but we don’t have time to get that through legal.’ Because we asked to be Viking Raiders because we heard through a little birdie told us, when we changed from War Machine to War Raiders, it was they were really stuck on Raiders. So all of the names had raiders in them. This time, Vince was really stuck on us being Vikings. He loved Vikings. Little known fact, Vince was a big fan of the history show Vikings, which is probably why we got called up in the first place, because he was like, Hey, we got Vikings on TV? Bring them up. So he wanted us to be the Viking something, right? And the problem is, Vikings are a very popular thing in culture right now. So nothing could get past legal, nothing could get trademarked, nothing could get whatever. Viking Experience was shockingly free, because no one wanted to be that, including us. So we asked to be Viking Raiders. By this point, it’s like, 7:30 right? The show’s going on at eight. He was like, ‘Well, we can’t get this cleared through legal at this point. So what we’ll do is, you’ll be the Viking Experience today, and if we really don’t like it, then we’ll be Viking Raiders next week. And you know, no press is bad press. So worst case scenario, people will talk. They’ll be talking about you.’ So we’re like, okay, and as we’re leaving the office, kind of in an afterthought, he goes, ‘Oh and by the way, one of you is Ivar, and one of you is Erik, I don’t care who.’ We just walked out. I looked and we were maybe two steps outside of his office, and Ivar grabs my arm for real, and he’s like, ‘Please don’t make me be Erik. My brother’s name is Erik.’ The bully in my brain for like, three seconds, I was like, Man, I really should be mean. No, okay, fine, you could be Ivar. But I really, it was close to us being the other way. I was like, Man, I don’t know how they came up with these names. Someone in creative might have just Googled famous Viking names or something. Because I did that afterwards, trying to figure out where they come up with these names? The first one was Erik the Red. Then it was Ivar the Boneless. I was like, Oh, cool. So it’s literally just Erik, Ivar. You guys are Vikings, yep, Eric and Ivar.”
On Sarah Logan/Valhalla thinking about making a return to WWE:
“Yeah, she is. She is a constant inspiration for me. She works so hard, she is so dedicated and disciplined. She keeps me on my diet so much better because she’s so disciplined with hers. She’s already running, jumping, throwing things, getting back into battle shape and getting ready. So yeah, I don’t know when this is gonna air, but I’m sure it won’t be too long in the future you start seeing her again.”
Erik also talks on winning the WWE World Tag Team Titles with Ivar, reverting back to the War Raiders name, his enhancement match with Mark Henry in 2006, ROH and more!
The interview was done before WrestleMania 41.
You can watch the full interview/episode below:
Quotes are courtesy of Chris Van Vliet’s podcast website.