Dalton Castle is a warrior.
Dalton Castle captured the ROH World Title at 'Final Battle' in December of 2017. It was Castle's first World Championship win in Ring Of Honor after being with the company since 2013. Castle held the strap until late June of 2018 when he was pinned by Jay Lethal in a Four-Way in-which the ROH World Championship was on the line.
Months before Castle lost the title it was well-known that he had been working through a plethora of injuries but wanted to continue going forward to represent ROH as the top champion. The pain soon caught up to Castle to the point where he could no longer move forward and the majority of that pain he was dealing with came from his back which was broken and had been broken for the past two years. Castle revealed that information when he joined Sam Roberts at 'Caroline's' during SummerSlam weekend for a live show this past August.
“Alright now life is pretty boring because I’m injured. I got hurt and here’s the truth about the injury, I broke my back everybody - pretty cool huh? And we’ve decided, several doctors thought that it might have been two years ago I broke it so I won a World Championship with a broken freaking back.” Castle revealed.
Castle stated that he did not have a timetable in terms of when he'll be back but he does know that he will be back in the squared circle at some point. He then went on to explain in detail the severity of the injury and why after battling through it for so many months he simply could not take it anymore.
“Well I know that I’m going to be back in the ring. I don’t know when. The problem was the pain just got to a level where I couldn’t handle it anymore where I wasn’t even able to stand on my feet for even a minute to do a promo, but… so yeah, yeah. I hurt my back maybe about two years ago and I knew it was bad because I watched the entire Summer Olympics on my living room floor." He said. "I have that mile marker, and then I slowly worked my way back to almost normal. I was stretching and yoga, and doing all this stuff where I felt I was good again, and then I hurt it again and then this time the pain was different. It started shooting down my hip and I couldn’t really get out of bed for more than a few minutes - getting in and out of a car was very, very difficult and a lot of my life is spent in car seats and airplane seats. So, fighting through the pain was no longer an option." Castle explained. "I had to figure out really what was wrong with me and found out what physical therapy and what muscles need to be strengthened to get things back moving, and now with this time off I’ve really been focusing on, ‘Tighten up that core’. Not just because it's summer and I wear a really small bathing suit, but because it’s my lively hood and I love wrestling, and I’d like to tell each and every one of you that I get in and out of a car like a champ now… but I still hurt a lot.” Castle laughed.
Jay Lethal has been reigning as ROH World Champion going on four months now and his most recent title defense was against Silas Young at 'Glory By Honor XVI'. To read about how Lethal fared in that bout, check out Fightful's results article of the show.
If you are going to use the quotes above, please credit the 'NotSam Wrestling Podcast' with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.
