Kevin Owens on Randy Orton’s Role In His Neck Injury Recovery

As noted before, Sunday’s WWE SummerSlam 2026 Night 2 event at the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota featured Kevin Owens making a surprise in-ring return to WWE for the first time since Februrary of 2025 due to a neck injury and surgery.

A recent episode of the WWE Now podcast featured Owens as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Owens’ thoughts about Randy Orton’s important role in his recovery from a neck injury and how Orton personally recommended the same surgeon who performed spinal fusion surgery on him.

“I had the best surgeon, Dr. Adam Kanter. I cannot, I just texted him that actually, I cannot thank him enough for what he did. I will forever be in debt to him

Randy Orton is actually the one who put me in touch with him. WWE has an amazing medical staff; we have amazing surgeons who we work with all the time, right? But Randy had worked with Kanter. Adam Kanter was the one who did Randy’s back surgery and saved his career, and he recommended that I talk to Adam Kanter as well, get several opinions on how to handle this neck surgery.

I decided to go with Adam Kanter, because if Randy Orton could trust him, there’s not a lot of people in wrestling I respect more than Randy, I trust Adam Kanter.

I’m so glad I went in that direction. So, 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 are still chances that I’d have lasting effects on the damage. And at one point my bones weren’t growing exactly how they should, or as fast as they do for other people. So we kept doing scans and scans and scans, and it just, it wasn’t, it didn’t look the way it was supposed to. So it was scary.”

Owens also gave his thoughts about how he was originally hopeful to be able to return in time for John Cena’s retirement tour for one last match with Cena.

“So actually, July 18, 2025 was my surgery. Usually six months after the surgery is the first scan. I started asking to do a scan in three months because when I was 20 years old, I had ACL surgery, and most people take nine months to get back from, that took me three. So I’m like ‘This is the same thing.’ In three months, my bones are fused because in my head, I’m gonna come back before John Cena retires so I can wrestle him one last time.”

Transcript h/t: F4WOnline.com