Erik On His Wife (Sarah Logan) Possibly Returning To WWE, His Near Fatal Motorcycle Accident & More

This week’s edition of the Insight with Chris Van Vilet podcast saw Vilet interview the now former WWE World Tag Team champion and one half of the War Raiders Erik. The interview was recorded during WrestleMania week before they dropped the titles to the current world tag team champions The New Day.

During the interview they spoke on a multitude of things from his near fatal motorcycle accident that lead to an almost career ending neck surgery, wrestling at WrestleMania, a potential return for his wife Sarah Logan and more.

Interview transcript courtesy of ChrisVanVliet.com.

How The War Raiders came to be:

“When we first got teamed up, because it wasn’t even our idea to team up. We wrestled in the Top Prospect Tournament. You had Ivar on the show. He’s going to be very, very proud of the fact that he won that match. Every time we go to Pittsburgh, he tells everyone in the building from the guys sweeping up the trash to Randy Orton and Triple H in the back that in Pittsburgh, he pinned me. So make sure this goes on the podcast, because that’s his most important thing that he brags about all the time. But yeah, after that match, I think Ring of Honor just liked how we looked together in the ring and they were like they both have beards, and both kind of this smash mouth thing. We’ll team them up. I’d only met him once before, and we talked, we had a lot of mutual friends and we got along right away. But at the same time, we had a conversation. We’re like, well there’s not really space on the Ring of Honor roster for us to be singles guys. Let’s do this tag team for a little bit, and then we’ll turn on each other, we’ll split up, and then go our separate ways. And then 11 years later, I think at this point, no split up.”

What it meant to compete at WrestleMania:

“Who could have ever drawn that play up? Especially because he and I both at different points in our career, in our lives, had some type of traumatic injury, accident, where we were told you should never wrestle again. I was told I shouldn’t have been alive, I should have died. So it’s a wild, wild ride that you can’t script that.”

The near fatal motorcycle accident:

“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.”

How is Erik still standing?:

“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.”

Erik’s new outlook on life:

“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.”

Erik’s near career ending neck surgery:

“Yeah, absolutely. So I got in a freak accident, I landed a suplex, I got dropped directly on my head, just one of those things. I think we kind of say it without really thinking about it that in wrestling any match could be our last, or any move could be our last, or whatever. We kind of don’t think about the weight of that. I was on a live event, non televised, just a match that we don’t really think about or we take for granted, doing a move, taking a suplex that I had taken 1000s of times in my career. Didn’t think once about it. For whatever reason, on that day, I over-rotated and landed directly in my head. When it happened, I knew I was hurt, but I didn’t know how bad I was hurt. I thought it was something that was in my trap, and everything kind of locked up. So I was treating it muscular. It got worse. We got MRIs, saw there was herniation in the disc. I kept wrestling, because I was like, well we can just keep treating this with PT. I was talking with doctors. I was doing whatever we did. I was doing PT like 3, 4, 5, times a week. I was getting dry needling, scraping, everything, trying to mitigate all the stuff I was doing. I was doing electric therapy and stuff like that, trying to stimulate the nerves, trying to doing everything I could to avoid surgery. But at the same time, I was wrestling every single week, I didn’t miss a match, and then I took another bad fall, just got tumbled up going over the ropes one time and it actually didn’t even hit my neck. I hit my elbow on the apron on the way over, and then three days later my tricep disappeared, my right lat shrank like half in size, and then my right pec flattened within days. I came in, and I was terrified. So I came into work that week, and we were scheduled for a match, actually, against New Day. Ironically enough, we were scheduled to wrestle The New Day. I sat down with medical, I sat down with Triple H and everybody, the consensus was, ‘Hey, you’re going to Birmingham tomorrow. You’re not flying home, cancel plans. We’re flying you from TV to Birmingham.’ I saw Dr Cordova. We did try a nerve block thing, because he was like, hey, maybe we can reverse some of this. So we tried that before cutting and then that didn’t have the effect that anyone wanted. So we did neck surgery but it was immediate, it was fast. It was like, bang, bang, bang.”

That sounds scary.

“It was. They’re going through the front now. So it’s ACDF surgery. It’s at level six, seven. Ivar’s got two levels. So his is actually the one above and mine, but our symptoms are totally different, even down to the fingers, our nerve pathway, the way that my nerve pathway was affected was totally different than his. So it’s funny that we both have surgically repaired necks, but our injuries couldn’t be more separate. But yeah, I’ve always been a fast healer. After the motorcycle wreck I was back in six months, so in my brain I was like, I’ll be back in six months. I’ve done this before, it’s fine. Six months came, I went for the scan, still didn’t have full fusion, seven months no fusion, eight months no fusion, nine months no fusion. Now I’m getting scared. What happens if this doesn’t fully fuse? What is life without wrestling? How does this go on? Then thank God, finally it did fuse. We showed full fusion, I was able to start training again, get back really quickly. But then it ended up being 13 months, I think, from surgery that I was out. There were definitely some times of like, this might be the end. So I was thinking, and I’m texting with Ivar, and talking to my wife every day, how do we go from here? What happens now? So it’s sobering to be struck there. So, then having the motorcycle wreck, then having the neck surgery. There’s all of this. Like, Hey, dude, don’t take anything for granted. Not a single flight, not a single match, not a single move, not a single day. Then with kids, you know this is bad as anybody, the days are long and the years are short.”

“So my oldest is already four years old. Even though I know you shouldn’t take anything for granted, you get weighed down by just how hard that is, not sleeping, not whatever, you know what I mean. I heard something that was like, parenting is only hard for good parents. I’m not saying that I’m the best parent in the world. I know I’m not. I just try my best every day. I care. We’re up at night. We’re up early, sleep late, whatever we have to do. I’m not trying to say that I’m better than anybody else, but you think about that, and you think about those kids and you just try to soak all that stuff in, even when it’s hard. It’s something that Sarah and I talk about a lot, like, wow, it’s hard. I remember with Cash, she’s breastfeeding, and we’re co-sleeping, we’re doing all this stuff. She’s not sleeping more than 30 to 45 minute stretches for like a month at a time. She looks at me, and she was just like how long can someone go without sleep before they die? I’m like, I don’t know, but it’s not yet.”

Could we possibly see Sarah Logan 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.”

You can catch the full interview on multiple platforms wherever you get your podcasts:

YouTube: