Chelsea Green knew something was seriously wrong with her face the second she got hurt—and she didn’t need a doctor to tell her.
During her appearance on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet, Green showed up sporting a black eye rather than trying to completely cover it with makeup. As she put it, wrestling is a business where you might as well get everything you can out of an injury. Green said she knew immediately that she had broken something. In fact, one of her first reactions was turning to the referee and telling them exactly that.
“It’s pretty dark, but like we’re in the business of milking it for what it’s worth. So, I will in fact put my entire face on and skip my eye. Immediately it happened, I looked at the ref—and people have spotted this—I looked at the ref, I said, ‘My face is broken.’ And that was it. I knew. I always know. Like wrestlers, we’re very in tune with our body. Athletes, very in—like you know immediately when something’s wrong. Even if it’s like a minor little thing, you know.”
Green initially believed she had fractured her cheek. She had dealt with broken bones before, but this one felt different.
“I’ve had quite a few things broken. I did think it was my cheek. I didn’t think it was my orbital bone. I thought I had cracked my cheek because I’ve had that before with a broken nose. But I heard kind of like a crack and then—yes, I heard a crack and then I felt like a whoosh of heat. Whenever you break something, it’s just like your adrenaline takes over. Especially in front of a live audience, I should say. When you have 10 to 20,000 people watching you, usually you don’t feel the pain. You feel a big rush of heat. But this was my most painful injury to date. And that should tell you something.”
The timing made it even worse. Green had just reached the top of WWE’s women’s division, and she admitted that more than a decade of work flashed through her mind when she realized what had happened.
“Like my whole—the whole, not just like week, like the week flashed before my eyes, but like 13 years flashed before my eyes. Rhea Ripley flashed before my eyes. Like all of it. I was like, ‘Come on.’ And do you know what the worst part was? I had just said to Sam Roberts, I think it was to Sam Roberts, I said it like every time something good in wrestling happens to me, it’s followed by something devastating. Something nasty happens to me right after. Like I have such bad luck.”
Once Green got to the emergency room, her focus immediately shifted toward figuring out how quickly she could get back in the ring. She said she wouldn’t even leave without getting some idea of a return timetable. Green also has another protective mask ready to go, complete with her own personal touch.
“I didn’t even leave the ER before making sure that they were able to clear me after X amount of weeks. Oh, I was not leaving without—no, no, no. What can I do? What would make you, like, the surgeons comfortable enough to say, ‘Okay, fine. On this day, you can wrestle?’”
“I’ve got a mask. I bedazzled it. Obviously, a second mask. I bedazzled it a different color this time. So, you’ll have to wait and see.”
She later got another opinion in Orlando and made sure she had written documentation showing when she could return. Green admitted WWE has every reason to be careful with an orbital injury because another bad break could cause serious damage around her eye. Green may have been staring at one of the most painful injuries she has ever suffered, but her first instinct was still figuring out how to get back to work without killing the momentum she had built.
What did you make of Chelsea Green pushing for a return date almost immediately after breaking her orbital bone? Leave your thoughts and feedback in the comments.
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