12 WWE Wrestlers Who Worked Through Chronic Injury

3. Rey Mysterio

Having wrestled the lucha libre style since the age of fourteen, Rey Mysterio was already facing career threatening injuries at the age of twenty four.

It didn’t help that he’d added a hardcore element to his style in ECW, and that he’d continually use the West Coast Pop as a finisher in WCW. That move is brutal on the knees, which is the chronic injury that he’d ultimately struggle most with. He eventually had to stop doing the West Coast Pop at all in WWE, as his knees were that screwed up from the move.

Like Austin he ended up wearing a knee brace and working through the pain. Some of his best WWE matches were performed when he had zero knee cartilage, and it was just bone on bone.

He worked for years with WWE through the chronic pain, and it wasn’t until stricter physical testing came into force that WWE forced him to take extended absences. He’s go away for a while, get surgeries, come back, and get injured again straight away.

It became such a messy situation that he barely wrestled at all in his final years with WWE and started to resent his employer for trying to recuperate the missed dates. They extended his contract by a year, before he was finally allowed to leave in 2015.

For the first half of his WWE career, he was pretty much working hurt every single night.