AEW star Eddie Kingston almost had to retire: Because he couldn’t afford the surgery

AEW star Eddie Kingston was going to retire after suffering a torn ACL, torn meniscus and fractured tibia in a 2024 match in Japan, and the reason will shock you: he said it was because he couldn’t afford the surgery with his insurance plan.

Seriously.

You assume professional athletes are covered, and they are in sports with good unions.

Pro wrestling ain’t one of those sports.

It took AEW founder and owner Tony Khan stepping in to offer to pay for the surgery out of pocket to keep Kingston in the sport.

“People can say whatever they want about Tony or AEW, but once I told Tony that, Hey, I can’t afford it, not with this insurance, so I’m just going to call it, and straight up, Tony was like, I’m not going to let you do that, so he paid for the surgery,” Kingston said in an interview with Mike Johnson of PWInsider.

Which, that’s a nice story, that Khan stepped up for Kingston, but, it’s also f**ked up that it would take the billionaire owner of the company being a nice guy to make that happen.

Without Tony Khan stepping up, Kingston, 43, is done.

“The minute the doctor told me, Yeah, you can live without an ACL, I was like, OK, well, I guess I’m done,” Kingston said in an interview with Mike Johnson of PWInsider.

Which would have been a frustrating end for Kingston, who plied his trade on the indies, with occasional runs in Ring of Honor, TNA and Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan’s reboot of the NWA, for 18 years before debuting in AEW in the summer of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic.

AEW was his big break – Kingston has been booked as a top midcarder, working programs with Bryan Danielson and Chris Jericho, among others, and getting runs as the Continental and Ring of Honor champ.

I would have assumed that he was making good money, given his place in the pecking order – and that the talents under contract in a company like AEW would have their medical costs covered, given that pro wrestlers would have obvious issues being able to get insurance on their own.

I was wrong on that, which is just, sad.

A quick scan of the Google machine tells me that ACL surgery can cost in the area of $25,000 to $50,000 out of pocket.

Khan, nice guy, good for him for being so, he picked up the cost – but, again, shouldn’t this be standard?