Wrestler shares serious injury forced him to retire last month at only 34 years old; sent message to Cody Rhodes
Being a wrestler is always a rather dangerous proposal. There are multiple risks attached to wrestling, and injuries are part and parcel of the industry. Unfortunately, an injury forced Megabyte Ronnie to retire earlier this year, as he discussed during a recent interview. In his retirement tweet, he also sent a message to Cody Rhodes.
Megabyte Ronnie, aka Ronnie Hartman, had not been a wrestler for too long. In fact, he started wrestling in 2018. Before that, he had been deployed in Afghanistan for five years and, after returning, became a professional competitive eater.
He is listed as 34 years old on the Major League Eating site. The star has been featured on Being The Elite due to his eating skits and has also appeared on AEW in a match where he lost to Brian Cage.
On May 11, he announced that he was retiring from a back injury. In the retirement message, he also sent a message to Cody Rhodes.
"Cody Rhodes: There probably is no chance you read this, but what most don't realize is the only reason I got to wrestle on Dark is because of the connection we made doing hot ones, thank you for giving me a platform for that allowed me to showcase myself."
Check out his retirement message below:
Thank You,
🌭✌️ https://t.co/uIo0kylCD0
During a recent interview with Fightful, Ronnie opened up on his injury and why he decided to retire.
"Basically, what happened is, I have two slipped discs and then I have one crushed disc. What happened was, the crushed disc, the doctor thinks it's probably been crushed for a long time and I just didn't know about it. About late January, I was in the gym and I was doing front squats and I heard something pop. Ever since that day, I've been having a lot of pain in my back, my hips, and things like that. I knew I was pretty messed up, I didn't know I was this messed up. When the doctor showed me the x-rays and explained everything to me. I'm in physical therapy right now, but the way the doctor explained things, I'm probably going to wind up needing surgery."
Megabyte Ronnie also provided a medical update on how he was doing after retiring as a wrestler
The wrestler said that he was in physical therapy to see what it could do for him. The first three weeks of doing physical therapy helped him a lot, but his back still locked up a lot, and as a result, he was left unable to move.
"I've been doing physical therapy for about three weeks and it has helped, but there are still a lot of times where my back gets locked up and I'm not able to move. I'll just be walking and all of a sudden my back locks up and I can't move. I wake up every morning in a lot of pain."
The champ is here!!!! https://t.co/xTJXVkZMgl
While he was in pain and had to take two hours before he was able to move his hips properly, he was trying to go the route of no surgery. The wrestler admitted that he didn't want to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
We at Sportskeeda wish Megabyte Ronnie all the strength in the world while dealing with his injury.