WWE Superstar JD McDonagh recently spoke with Chris Van Vliet and discussed the match that took place back on the January 27 episode of Raw, in which he suffered broken ribs and a punctured lung after a botched move, hitting the back of his head on the announce table.
During the World Tag Team Championship Match against the War Raiders on that episode, McDonagh went for a springboard moonsault off of the middle rope, landing on Ivar. When he landed, he hit the back of his neck on the announce table. Doctors immediately went to check on him, but he signaled that he was fine to continue.
The War Raiders would eventually retain the titles after pinning Dominik to retain.
“Time heals all. I wasn’t like this the first week or two after but I’m feeling a lot better now. [I’m feeling] pretty good. My lungs are good. My ribs are good. I’m just kind of waiting for the bones to knit back together before they clear me.”
When talking to Van Vliet about the botched spot, McDonagh said the following:
“I guess it was in the planning stage really. I needed to be on that side of the ring for something that was going to come up later on. So I said, I’ll just do it on the announce table side. I’ve done it on that side before, but whatever happened on this one, I just was maybe a foot too far forward or a foot too far back and wiped out. In that moment I was just thinking, when’s the next breath gonna come? I knew that I didn’t hit my head that hard, because I knew I’d missed a spot in the match and I knew what was coming up next. So I knew I wasn’t unconscious or anything like that, and then I don’t know, it was like an out-of-body experience, listening to Michael Cole with the concern in his voice. I’ve heard him all through the years being like we got to get a medic down here, and then all of a sudden you’re lying at his feet and he’s saying it about you.”
McDonagh said that he did not fully collapse after the match and talked about what happened when he got backstage.
“So we got back behind, not even to the curtain. I had my arms over Dom and Carlito coming up the aisle way, and that was really hurting me. But I couldn’t take my hands off them or I would have fallen down. I didn’t want to fall down in Gorilla because there was loads of people waiting to go out to the next match, and you don’t want to sell for anybody in the office. So I just lay down on the other side of the curtain, thinking that I was out of the eyeline of people, but I was in view of the fans. They caught a photo of my feet sticking out into the entrance way they said JD has just collapsed backstage. But I just had to lie down and catch my breath. It wasn’t a full collapse”
McDonagh said that he has been working out in the gym and doing really low impact cardio, Pilates and other non-impactful work-outs.
You can watch and listen to the entire interview below:
Quotes provided by Fightful.