Kevin Owens shared additional details on his arduous recovery process from neck surgery after returning at SummerSlam.
Owens, 42, underwent neck surgery in July 2025 and had not wrestled since the Elimination Chamber show on March 1, 2025, for an unsanctioned match with Sami Zayn.
Owens was interviewed by Sam Roberts on WWE Now and downplayed how much of a “surprise” his return was after outlets, including ours, had reported his return was imminent. Owens shared that he leaned on Randy Orton for advice and the fellow WWE performer steered him in the direction of the orthopaedic surgeon that handled his back surgery.
If people only knew how unlikely this looked at one point during this recovery process, yeah, it’s wild to be here.
I had the best surgeon, Dr. Adam Kantor. I cannot thank him enough for what he did. I’ll forever be in debt to him. Randy Orton is the one that put me in touch with him. WWE has an amazing medical staff. We have amazing surgeons we work with all the time, but Randy had worked with Kantor. Adam Kantor is the one that did Randy’s back surgery and saved his career, and he recommended that I talk to Adam Kantor and get several opinions on how to handle this neck surgery. I decided to go with Adam Kantor because if Randy Orton can trust him, there’s not a lot of people in wrestling I respect more than Randy. I trust Adam Kantor and am so glad I went that direction. As amazing a surgeon as he is, the severity of my injury and the damage to my spinal cord was so severe that even though they decompressed my spinal cord a lot, fixed a lot in there, there was still chances that I would have lasting effects of the damage. At one point, my bones weren’t growing exactly how they should, as fast as they do for other people, so we kept doing scans and scans and scans, and it didn’t look the way it was supposed to. It was scary, and then a few weeks ago, they saw what they had to see.
Owens said that he had hoped to race back from neck surgery in time to wrestle John Cena before he retired last year, but that was clearly not in the cards. After nine months, it still didn’t look good according to the scans of his neck. He finally saw progress after a scan in early July, and they deemed he had made enough progress to work out in the ring and entered a ring for the first time on July 18, one year to the day of his surgery.
