Sonjay Dutt realized after his first surgery in professional wrestling that it was the right move to transition to a backstage role.
All Elite Wrestling‘s Sonjay Dutt was the latest guest on AEW Unrestricted with Tony Schiavone and Aubrey Edwards to discuss a wide variety of subjects. When asked about how he arrived at the decision to retire from in-ring competition and focus on producing, Dutt said that he put things in perspective and wanted to give back and be valuable in a new way.
“We started Ring Ka King, and that is when I started to kind of format television, script television, time television, layout storylines in a weekly episodic manner,” Sonjay Dutt said. “I learned all that stuff, and then five years later, I was 35, and I got hurt. At the time, I was already working in the office at IMPACT Wrestling, and when I got hurt and came back from injury, I kind of looked at the landscape, and I looked at the big picture of my life.
“My wife and my children are first and foremost in everything, and getting hurt and my first surgery after 27 years or so, I just figured I’m already working in a backstage capacity instead of just splitting my time. Let me put all my eggs here in a backstage capacity, and let’s see how far this thing goes because I’m a realist. I’ve been a realist my entire career where I see that the big picture is me working backstage, learning everything there is to learn, and making myself valuable for as long as possible because my body may fail me, but I hope my brain won’t fail me.
“So that was kind of my thought process in transferring 100% into a backstage capacity plus TV days to do everything that I was doing, and then I’ll try and put together a match and excel in the ring physically with a generation that had already upped me was tough, so I feel I made the right decision.”
What do you make of Sonjay Dutt’s comments? Do you respect him for understanding when it was time to transition his role in the business? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
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