Thirteen years of doubts and questions were washed away for Nigel McGuinness as he walked i🅰nto Wembley Stadium and was met by the thunderous sound of shock aဣnd joy from around 50,000 fans.
McGuinness, 48, made a surprise return to the ring for the Casino Gauntlet match at AEW All In on Aug. 25 in his hometown of London fo♋r his fir♋st match since retiring from action in 2011 and moving behind the commentary desk.
“Since I retired, there are always so many what-ifs, if I just carried on wrestling could I have had a decent career? Could I have had the same success that Bryan Danielson had, and maybe I wasn’t good enough?” McGuinness said. “All these questions and all this sort of feeling of, maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. Then in a way, just walking out there, just made it all melt away. And that reaction, they were very generous.”
He said he was usually nervous before matches and expected it to be amplified after 13 years away, but felt nothing of the sort once he walked out and eventually heard the fans singing his name. Instead, he soaked in a full-circle moment as he attended WWE’s SummerSlam in 1992 at the olౠd Wembley Stadium and left committed to becoming a wrestler.
“I’m still buzzing off it, and it just seems like an alternate universe that somehow I’ve sort of slipped into,” McGuinness said of All In.
McGuinness, who made his name wrestling in Ring♏ of Honor from 2003-09, got a kick out of mixing it up with t𒊎he wrestlers whose matches he regularly calls for AEW Collison on Saturdays (8 p.m., TNT) and “see how talented they all are,” including Orange Cassidy and Kazuchika Okada — plus a face-off with fellow English wrestling star Zack Sabre Jr. that popped the London crowd.
“It really was just a moment, and we only got 30 seconds before other people got involved,ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ” McGuinness said. “But yeah, it was brilliant. It was fantasti𝓀c.”
The ni𒐪ght was the culmination of two years of possibilities.
McGuinness said the idea of him unretiring first came up last year o💧n a cross-country flight with AEW president Tony Khan, who revealed the company was planning to run Wembley for the first time.
“I made a joke, tongue in cheek,” McGuinness said. “I said, ‘Well, you know, maybe if we sell out, I’ll dust the boots off. And he said, ‘Would you be interested?’ I said, ‘Maybe.’”
If if were to happen, McGuinness wanted it to be meaningful 🦂and notꦐ just be added to the show so he could unretire.
The ideal plan would have been for him to reignite his famed Ring💫 of Honor world championship rivalry with Danielson that spanꦫned 13 singles matches across multiple companies from 2006-09.
But the “American Dragon” broke his arm in a classic against Okada at Forbidden Door last June 2023 an๊d wasn’t cleared to wrestle in Lond꧒on.
“Even though he’s got two hundred and six bones in the human body, two hundred and five were perfectly OK, he still found a reason not to wrestle me at Wembley Stadium,” McGuinness said.
He said Khan didn’t speak init🌸ially of him giving it a go for this year’s All In. McGuinness stayed ready by training weekly in a ring locally in California or before Collision.
Another All In match was needed for McGunniess this year when a clash with Danielson — who is in his final year as a full-time wrestler — wasn’t an option with the former WWE star winning the Owen Hart Cup tournamen🍃t and eventually beating Swerve Strickland in the main event for the AEW world championship.
The gauntlet match made sense becausꦦe winning would have earned McGuinness an AEW world championship match against Danielson. Christian Cage took the win instead.
“So many people reach out and said, ‘You look so happy … seemed such a peace and I really was, “McGuinness said. “It was just incredible to get in the ring with some of those guys.”
His in-ring return was kept pretty close to the vest, with only Khan and a few of the people on the writing team knowing a week before the show and the week of All In. McGuinness said he was♛n’t giving the other wrestlers an answer if they asked. Most people learn about it the day of the show
Funny enough, i🧔t was likely legendary bro✅adcaster Jim Ross who found out first — just before McGuinness went out
McGuinness came back to the announcers’ room after calling the first two matches and Ross asked him what else he planned for the show before he made a quick change to prepare for the match
“I just start undressing, start putting on wrestling gear,” McGuinness said. “And you can see [him] trying to sort of compute this and understand what I’m doing. Am I going to go and work out during the show? Tongue in cheek I sort of said, ‘You know what, I might go and be part of the Casino Gauntlet match.’ He said, ‘Well good luck to you.’ So everyone, sort of little by little that day, started seeing me getting involved.”
McGuinness is leavingꦰ the door open for another match. He would absolutely do the elusive clash with Danielson, but knows his rival is dealing with a neck injury and only has months left in his full-time career.
“My goal was to wrestle Bryan,” McGuinness said. “He was scared. I think he’s still scared. I don’t know whether that would ever be a reality. He is not in the best state of affairs right now, he is legitimately banged up. He’s probably gonna have to have surgery. He’s only got so many matches left and the last thing he wants to do is take a lariat from Nigel McGuinness and hasten his exit from professional wrestling.”
Thougꦇh McGuinness said a few other matches make sense for him, he would ♔consider them on a case-by-case basis.
“The impetus for me coming back was to wrestle Bryan, whether you look at it storyline-wise or as an honest of God truth is obviously a good degree of jealousy, a better phrase, envy, because of success that he’s had that’s not really a knock on him. Of course, it’s not.
“It’s but it’s just something that sometimes it was always hard to deal with, and it’s not even necessary, just Bryan. So many of my peers that I came up with went on to have such success that it was a difficult pill to swallow for the longest time, but walking out at Wembley and having that moment, it really has given me closure in that regard.”
He doesn’t “want to ever go back to being a wrestler full-time” and step away from a commentary job he 🦄loves.
McGuinness, who also performs a magic show outside of wrestling, may never have foun💧d his way to the commentary desk had he not retired when he did, admitting he was the only one stopping his return to the ring.
“It’s a strange feeling when you realize the only thing that was stopping you wrestling was you,” McGuinness said. “There was no reason I couldn’t wrestle that whole time.”
Some circumstances and setbacks led to it happening as he felt left with no place to wres♛tle in 2011.
McG🐲uinness had left Ring of Honor and signed with WWE. But the company took back the contract because they wouldn’t clear him unless he had surgery to repair a torn biceps he had been wrestling for two years with after his doctor had cleared him to do so.
After signing with TNA, he was diagnosed with Hepatitis B, which took him out of action for a year. TNA released him weeks before he would have cleared the virus and could have returned to the ri♋ng.
He said he didn’t want to go back to Ring of Honor and wrestle their style for the money they were paying at the time and instead filmed a retirement tour for a documentary “The Last of Nigel McGuinness,” hoping WWE might see the story and be interested enough to offer him a chance to wrestle there.
It🌼 never happened, but Ring of Honor brought him back as a commentator and matchmaker and he “let any dream of🎃 being a wrestler go.”
He has becom🍌e one of the best and most entertaining color men in the business — usually leaning toward praise for the heel and throwing jabs at the babyface while blending in his knowledge as a wrestler with those strong opinions. McGuinness also worked for WWE on its NXT UK brand from 2016-22 before joining AEW in 2023 — praising Khan for giving him a chance to flouri🎃sh.
“Certainly in WWE, maybe not now✃, but certainly﷽ under previous regimes you had certainly more constraints in terms of what you could say,” McGuinness said. “There were words, there were ideas, there were notions that you wanted to try to steer clear from and avoid, and to some extent, perhaps that made you a better commentator, to find different ways of saying things.
“But to play devil’s advocate, if you can take that Governor off and you’re not worried about what you’re going to say and who you’re going to offend, then you can really, really find your voice. And I think I’ve definitely found my voice in AEW, because of the freedom that I have there.”
He now has the freedom to chart what comes next for him in the ring as we🐭ll♈ after his emotional return.
With so much envy, doubts and questions that followed him🌟 for 13 years gone, McGuinness enters t༺his next stage of his career with a different feeling.
“I feel very ꧙much at peace, very satisfied, very happy with whatever comes next in my life,” McGuinness said. “Which is kind of a scary place to be, because when you get to that position of peace, yo꧅u kind of want to last forever.”
