There’s a little bit of denial that comes along with the unceremonious end of a wrestling career. That’s especially true when it’s part of an angle. Any time after that it’s always in the back of your mind that it can’t surely be the end. “Give it time, there’s got to be one more match,” is the paraphrased gist of what we tell ourselves.
If you looked at the last year of Gunther’s career, logically you knew how Royal Rumble was going to go once the career stipulation was added. From Goldberg to John Cena, to AJ Styles and maybe Randy Orton, the throughline was founded on Gunther eliminating the status quo of WWE. The mainstays, the champions of yesterday, the legends who changed the game and carried their companies at different points of their careers in the last 30 years.
Coming into 2026 we knew we had a limited amount of time left with AJ Styles. Although there’s obvious poetry to running off into the sunset almost 10 years to the day of his WWE debut, it still feels too soon. And it’s weird — Styles’ early 2026 exit from WWE feels brutishly abrupt, and my sense is his days of being a consistent, present full-time performer are definitely done. It’s nonetheless bittersweet, yet having watched him from his WCW debut, and picking him up again as a staple in my rolodex of wrestling favourites once TNA launched, seeing him sign with WWE and winning two world championships; earning the right to go out on his own terms feels earned. Deserved. And we should be happy for him for that being his new reality.
‘What’s Your Story?’
A few days ago Styles was a guest on Stephanie McMahon’s podcast. Two things jumped out to me as I was listening to him throughout the 90+ minute podcast. First, it’s clear he wants to be around his family as much as possible. That’s especially so for his young daughter and youngest of three boys. The importance of his family life is no surprise, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk that long about anything not necessarily related to wrestling. Secondly, his tone never changed and it’s clear that in his mind — at least as of right now — he’s done. That echoes statements that both Triple H and Peter Rosenburg gave during WWE media in the moments and days after the Royal Rumble.
This also doesn’t mean he’ll never wrestle again. It doesn’t mean he’s 100% “never-returning” retired, but in this moment, right now, he’s done. He may return to WWE, he may wrap up in TNA, he can go wrestle his buddies in AEW or NJPW, and that’s all fine. We have to respect that decision as much as the one to retire even for a short while after a 26-year career that was punctuated by WWE, IWGP, TNA and NWA world championships. We have to respect his choices as someone who carried the torch of Shawn Michaels to trailblaze in TNA’s X-Division like no one before him. He accomplished all of that and has earned his time and space to decide if his final chapter is indeed “it,” or if he needs an epilogue before finally closing the book on a career that has seen him wrestle in four decades.
That’s the little glimmer of hope from a selfish perspective. For as certain as he seems about retirement and wanting to be around his wife and kids more, there is still the moment he took his gloves off and stopped himself from laying them down in the centre of the ring. It was a moment when questioned by Stephanie that he couldn’t explain nor answer with finality. It’s as if to say, “yeah, I’m retired, but maybe not. Maybe I come back for one more.”
Frankly, I’m fine either way because he has been a consistent favourite since the first match of his that I saw. I remember his classics with Christopher Daniels and Samoa Joe — especially the triple threat — as much as I do his cage match and series with Abyss. I remember his first NWA title win, and then (for me) his defining third NWA title win against Jeff Jarrett. He’s part of why I think wrestling alternatives are important, and he’s the one who brought me back to watching wrestling full time when he finally arrived in WWE.
WWE Debut and the year that was 2016
I hadn’t been watching much wrestling from about 2010 when Shawn Michaels retired through to this point. I kept tabs on it here and there, watched some shows, caught highlights, read results here on this site, but scarcely got too invested.
I’ve told this story before, but Chris Benoit was one of my favourite wrestlers at one point and that tragedy that overtook his legacy and rightfully dwarfs it was fairly depressing. It felt like I was detaching from wrestling as a whole, and this was right around the time UFC was blowing up too so I spent more time watching MMA. It was hardly all rosy, since GSP and Mirko Cro Cop had just got their butts kicked that spring, but it was expected as MMA can be very unkind. The Benoit tragedy was something else though that transcended the compartmentalization of life and content and was just tragically sad. For Nancy Benoit and Daniel, his surviving children, and then just outright anger toward Chris. Even now when we understand CTE and brain trauma so much more than we did, that doesn’t overrule the finality of his choices. It is a black mark for me.
For me, that was maybe the beginning of the end — toward a retirement, if you will — and after that I watched less WWE, watched more TNA again, and mostly checked in on WWE around WrestleMania. By the time HBK and Undertaker had their second match, the one where Michaels retired, I was good with leaving wrestling behind. HBK is not a perfect human, but to right himself, find a new path, defeat a career threatening injury and arguably come back better than ever to only leave the right way, head held high on his terms felt like a good way to leave. When a lot of people my age have watched the people they grew up watching pass on far too early be it due to health, drugs or general self-destructiveness, getting to see someone go that way just felt good.
A few years went by and I started hearing about TNA falling apart again. I checked out some shows and ultimately saw Styles had left for Japan. Those are matches I’d never see for a few years still, but I knew what he was doing and I had a friend I was working with who was deep into NJPW and would update me and send me links to things here and there. One of those was that early 2016 Wrestle Kingdom match with Shinsuke Nakamura for the IWGP IC title. Not too long after that AJ debuted in WWE at the 2016 Royal Rumble, and while I wasn’t back full time, I watched everything he did because when it came down to it, he was my guy.
2016 was also the year my dad passed away, and he was the primary reason I started watching wrestling when I was really young. I also remember multiple times when I tried to get him into TNA before it started being, well, less good, that AJ Styles was someone who stood out to him just purely in terms of what he could do in the ring. He hated most of the “flippy shit” TNA was doing with the X-Division, but saw Styles for as good as he was in those early years. There are a lot of reasons I got back into wrestling full time about 10 years ago now, but a large part of it was because Styles was finally getting the widespread respect he’d more than earned, and it gave me something else to grab onto as we were losing my dad.
For the first time in a long time, wrestling excited me.
There was no turning back at that point, and from there I started watching WWE consistently again, got into Ring of Honor that year too while Cody Rhodes was in the midst of his indie run, and as we headed into the new year, got a NJPW World subscription to watch Wrestle Kingdom, that Okada-Omega match, and finally, to watch all of those Styles matches from 2014-2016.
The Phenomenal One
We’re about a week removed from Royal Rumble 2026 and optimism be damned, Styles lost to Gunther and for now it’s a wrap on his career.
From his early days teaming in WCW as Air Raid alongside Air Paris, to putting TNA on the map with his X-Division highlight reels, to forging his name in the history books as a 3-time NWA champion, Styles made every moment count and created iconic memories before even hitting the age of 25. By the time he was 29 he had become a 6 time TNA X-Division champion, 3 time NWA champion, 3 time TNA champion, and co-held the NWA and TNA tag team championships six times. Sprinkled around that you had a Legends title reign, a TV title reign and an ROH Pure title reign alongside a litany of indie title reigns before ever setting foot in New Japan Pro Wrestling.
Thinking back on his early TNA days, I’m reminded of his Iron Man matches with Christopher Daniels, their triple threat with Samoa Joe at Unbreakable 2005, Styles’ war with Abyss in Six Sides of Steel, his matches with Kurt Angle or his murderers’ row of X-Division challengers in Roderick Strong, Petey Williams, Chris Sabin, Jerry Lynn, Low Ki, Sean Waltman, the Amazing Red, and D’Lo Brown without even breathing the names of Joe and Daniels. That’s also without mentioning he stepped into the ring with Raven. Through each match he blended his athletic style into whatever the matchup called for, whether it meant going move for move with his peers, fighting heavyweights that overmatched him physically in every way, or getting down and dirty in cages or weapons-based environments. Before he even left TNA he had led a commendable, dare I say phenomenal, career that he could have retired on, hung his hat on, and been proud of. And the annals of wrestling history would probably not hold that against him.
Instead of that though he tested himself in Japan and won the IWGP title twice, while wrestling Okada, Tanahashi, Nakamura, Ishii, Naito, Ibushi, Shibata, and even MMA legend Kazushi Sakuraba. He had classics with many of them, with the ones against Tanahashi, Okada and Nakamura being the benchmarks others hold as the standard. He parlayed that into a 10-year WWE run where he became a two time WWE champion, 3 time U.S. champion, 1 time IC champion and multi-time tag team champion. In WWE he went toe-to-toe and had classic matches with John Cena — including their Royal Rumble 2017 match where they never left the ring — as well as picking up his rivalries with Bryan Danielson, Joe and Nakamura. He wrestled Brock Lesnar in one of Lesnar’s best matches in his WWE career. Then there was his U.S. title series with Kevin Owens, or a personal favourite of mine from a night in Minnesota in 2017 when he and Finn Balor went head to head. He also became the first recognized wrestler to win the WWE championship overseas when he (mercifully) defeated Jinder Mahal to begin his year-long reign that stands as one of the longest in WWE history.
History seemed to follow Styles wherever he went, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that he gained a following the long way, over time and through the decades of his career by never phoning a match in; even when he was injured during his year-long WWE title run. He earned respect that isn’t transactional, the kind that gets you 16 separate WWE championship matches on a global tour in 2024 against Cody Rhodes, and the type that earns the adoration from your peers such that they want to work with you because you’ve been the benchmark for in-ring work in the 21st century.
I have many good memories watching him work, from TNA through to Royal Rumble 2026, from across the U.K. indies thanks to YouTube to NJPW streaming on World. If Styles has definitely, 100% called it a career, then it was a career worth watching, one worth experiencing as it happened, and for him, one worth living and breathing.
The optimist in us might hold on to another final stretch in WWE, or one final run in TNA, or even the far less likely round or two in AEW to say goodbye to his buddies. However, as great as that sounds, I’m content saying goodbye. I’ll be happy if he puts the gloves on one last time for a grand epilogue, but if we’ve seen our last Phenomenal Forearm, last Styles Clash or last Calf Slicer, and even if we never see him pull off another Spiral Tap, then AJ Styles leaves behind one of the greatest careers I have watched, and he gets to leave on his own terms. More than that he gets to be with his family, one that he sacrificed everything for, with his health intact.
