Will Ospreay wasn’t inside a wrestling ring when Alex Windsor realized his neck injury was far more serious than they thought. He was driving—and suddenly felt pain shooting all the way down his hand.
Windsor revealed the scary moment while speaking with SHAK Wrestling. She explained that aches and pains are normal when two wrestlers live under the same roof, but this was different. Ospreay didn’t need to take a bump or wrestle a match to trigger the pain. It was following him into everyday life.
“Being in the industry, everyone has those moments of, ‘This aches, that hurts,’ or, ‘This happened the other day.’ But I think it was when we were at home. Say we’d been to work and he had just done a promo, or we’d been to work and he hadn’t done a singles match—not the type of thing where you’d think, ‘Oh, he’s still got neck pain afterward.’”
The real wake-up call came while they were driving around their neighborhood. Ospreay had his hands on the steering wheel when the pain suddenly traveled down into his hand.
“I think we were driving once, just around our area, and he had his hands on the wheel. He was like, ‘God, I’ve got that pain going down my hand.’”
That was the moment Windsor knew they were not dealing with something that a few weeks of rest would fix. Ospreay was hurting while doing one of the most basic things imaginable—and that set off every alarm bell.
“I think it’s when it’s just day-to-day situations that we’re in and he’s still in that much pain. It was sort of like, ‘God, this is real. This isn’t just an injury that’s going to be all right in a couple of weeks.’ It was something that was really catching him off guard just doing normal things—not even training. He was just driving a car. That was when it was really like, ‘Okay, this is actually quite serious.’”
Things did not get easier once Ospreay stepped away from the ring. Windsor said the first few weeks hit him especially hard because wrestling had been ripped out of his life and there was no clear answer for when he could return.
“I think the first few weeks were definitely the hardest for him, more so than myself. From my perspective, I was trying to look at it like, ‘You’ve gone two weeks. That’s two weeks less that you’ve got to look forward to now.’ At this point, you can start training again. At this point, you might be able to get in the ring again.”
Windsor tried to keep him looking forward, but she also knew when to back off. Some days, Ospreay did not need a pep talk. He needed someone to sit there and let him unload.
“There were some moments where he didn’t need me to say anything. I think I just needed to allow him to get his feelings out there. Sometimes you don’t always want someone to say, ‘Oh no, it’s fine. This is going to happen soon.’ Sometimes you just need to vent and for someone to say, ‘Look, just tell me what you need to tell me. If you don’t want any advice, that’s fine.’”
The injury stripped away Ospreay’s independence. Windsor said he could not even lift things during the early stages, leaving one of wrestling’s most explosive performers feeling completely useless at home.
“Those first few weeks, he couldn’t even lift anything up. I think he very much felt hindered by all of that. We’ve all gone through it. We’ve all had injuries. We’ve all been in that place where we feel like we can’t do anything for ourselves and you just feel like, ‘I’m useless.’”
Ospreay eventually started making progress and worked his way back into the ring. Windsor said seeing the difference between those brutal opening weeks and the end of his recovery made the entire fight mean even more.
“Even from those first two weeks when he was injured to the last two weeks, the improvement he was making and being able to get back into the ring—I think that makes it more worth it, where you can look back at how you were at the start to how he was by the end of it.”
Ospreay made it back, but Windsor’s story shows just how frightening things became before that comeback. His neck injury was not simply keeping him from wrestling—it was causing shooting pain while he was behind the wheel and turning basic tasks into a struggle.
What do you make of Windsor’s account of the moment she realized Ospreay’s injury was serious? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
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