Randy Orton: I Would Love To Wrestle Into My 50s

Randy Orton doesn’t intend on retiring from professional wrestling anytime soon.

WWE Superstar Randy Orton recently spoke with Adam’s Apple. When asked about when he intends to retire, Orton surprisingly answered that he hopes he can wrestle into his 50s now, thanks to the spinal fusion surgery he underwent a year and a half ago.

“If you were to ask me two years ago, I would have thought it would have been close to the end. But I had a spinal fusion a year and a half ago, and that changed the game,” Randy Orton said. “I’ve been in pain throughout my entire 30s. I was hurting; I was begging for time off when I was 35. I think Vince’s quote to me was, ‘Mother Nature gets us off.’ And that’s hard to hear when you’re 35, and your back hurts, and you’re busting your ass for this company.

“There’s been some changes, and now I think instead of pushing guys, running their dicks into the ground until they fall apart, there’s a great atmosphere here now where they go, okay, how can we make this guy last? And the beauty of it is I’m not even there yet. I feel so great after my surgery, I’m a full time guy. I don’t want to do the old Undertaker or Shawn Michaels schedule. Which they needed to do, understandably, but wrestle at WrestleMania take the summer off, maybe you see them at SummerSlam yadda yadda yadda.

“I want to be on the road every week. I want to make all the TVs; I want to be on all the PLEs. And at 44, I just turned 44; I would love to be able to go into my 50s. Maybe I wrestle until I’m 50 and call it, and that’s 30 years. Thirty years with the same company on top. I’ve received more pay-per-views, PLEs, whatever you want to call it, than anyone else in the history of the WWE. So I’ve been around a long time. But not only that, I’ve been here the whole time. I’ve been busting my ass, whether I’m injured or not. [I’ve] been showing up, and it just feels like now is the perfect environment for me to thrive.

“And if I do need to take a week off because I am getting up there, I get it. There’s no question; it’s been twice since I’ve been back in November, where I was like, ‘Hey, Hunter, can I take a week to just recover so that I can be 100% for the following week?’ He said, ‘Oh, sure. As long as you communicate that to me, no problem.’ So having that in my back pocket, it’s a real peace of mind knowing that if I need — because I am 44, if I need a week, they’ll give it to me.”