Mike Verna

Pro Wrestling Illustrated, November 2022

Mike Verna, “Man Of Steel,” is lying face-down a short distance from me, with about a baker’s dozen of acupuncture needles in his lower back, and they’re hooked up to a PENS unit. He’s getting carefully regulated electrical shocks into the area that’s bothering him most today, under a red UV light. It looks like a ‘60s sci-fi concept for what medicine of the 2020s would be like. 

On Monday, May 2, Mike Verna’s car was hit: precisely where he was sitting in the driver’s seat and nowhere else. The other driver was going the wrong way on the Triborough Bridge. Verna’s whole body crumpled and compressed with the impact. 

“It’s gonna be alarming to see how much damage I’ve done to my body over the years.”

He explains to me that once his body became injured in these vast and severe ways, the dam just broke. He’s confident that his wrestling career has been an exercise in accumulating physical damage, and that there’s really no way to get around it. Put frankly: “The only way to prep your body for bumps is to take ‘em.”

However, with two herniated discs in his back, one torn rotator cuff, a torn ACL, torn meniscus, “every tendon and ligament except for the Achilles torn in [one] foot,” and brain damage, doctors credit the strength of his neck and shoulders — and his entire body — for withstanding the impact alive and with an entire spine mostly intact. 

When he tells me how his neck could have easily snapped in a different body (whiplash concussion), he expresses concern for the newer generation of wrestlers and a lack of strength training. 

This is only the second appointment in a day of four. His schedule consists of these marathon days up to three days a week.

We have to rush after this, and Mike’s partner is waiting in the car. We have to get to the MRI appointment, and we’re discussing which MRIs feel most like a coffin. 

There’s some confusion and I’m snuck in quickly to take exactly four secret pictures of Mike’s body going into the big machine. Then, almost instantly, we’re back around the corner from the acupuncturist, at cognitive therapy. 

This feels like a cool down session at the gym, but the EEG headset hooked to his head and ears set off the “Excess Tension” notification on the screen as he’s solving logic puzzles. 

Weeks later, Mike is texting me “Comeback mode is in effect” with the flexing arm emoji. He’s catching me up on news concerning his knee and helpfully listing the six MRIs he’s had thus far, and the two CAT scans. 

He previously stated, “Your body’s reacting to something it’s never done before,” about his own situation and sudden injuries. But it’s really true for everyone. You just keep taking bumps and taking bumps, and no amount of training is enough to make danger disappear forever.