JD McDonagh On His CRAZY Injury, Judgement Day, Finn Balor, RKO Off The Cage, Tag Team Titles

JD McDonagh (@jd_mcdonagh) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet to discuss the scary bump he took on Raw, how he was able to finish the match and the injuries he sustained, his recovery and when he hopes to return to the ring, how he went from wrestling in Ireland to signing with WWE, joining The Judgment Day, becoming Tag Team Champion with his mentor Finn Balor, taking an RKO from the top of the cage at Survivor Series WarGames 2023 and more!

Quote I'm thinking about: “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.” — Eckhart Tolle

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On how he is feeling right now:

"Time heals all. I wasn't like this the first week or two after but I'm feeling a lot better now. [I’m feeling] pretty good. My lungs are good. My ribs are good. I'm just kind of waiting for the bones to knit back together before they clear me."

On the scary announce table bump:

"I guess it was in the planning stage really. I needed to be on that side of the ring for something that was going to come up later on. So I said, I'll just do it on the announce table side. I've done it on that side before, but whatever happened on this one, I just was maybe a foot too far forward or a foot too far back and wiped out."

On his immediate thoughts after the accident:

"In that moment I was just thinking, when's the next breath gonna come? I knew that I didn't hit my head that hard, because I knew I'd missed a spot in the match and I knew what was coming up next. So I knew I wasn't unconscious or anything like that, and then I don't know, it was like an out-of-body experience, listening to Michael Cole with the concern in his voice. I've heard him all through the years being like we got to get a medic down here, and then all of a sudden you're lying at his feet and he's saying it about you."

On getting back into the match:

"Everything goes really slow in moments like that. I wasn't thinking I gotta get through this match. It was just okay, what's next? Can I do that? Let's do it. So I wiggled my fingers and toes and I was like, okay, I can do that. I got a breath back. I can probably stand up. So I stood up and got back in there."

On if he knew how bad the injury was at that point:

"I thought it was maybe cracked ribs. I could feel my ribs on this side were like rice krispies under my skin, they're definitely messed up. I couldn't get a full lung full of air but I just thought that was because I was winded from hitting the table. Then the adrenaline kicked in and I was okay, I can do this. I can get back in there and do my part in the match. I didn't want to leave the guys, especially because it was one of the first few weeks that we were on Netflix. Everyone's excited about it, huge audience watching you for the Tag Team Titles, War Raiders' first defense, yeah, I didn't want to [quit]. If I can stand up and keep participating, then I'm gonna."

On not wanting to quit the match:

"The thought of stopping didn't even enter my mind. The referee came down, and he asked me what city we were in and what date it was. I told him that I'm okay and I told him where we were and what we were doing. I said, 'Tell Dom that I'm okay and I just need a minute.' He passed the message on, and then the ref actually got a lot of heat for it online, Shawn Bennett. But as far as him doing his job he can only do or relay the message of what I'm telling them and I told him I was good to go. One of the WWE docs came out in the ad break. She checked me over, and I knew if she touched my ribs she wouldn't let me back in there. So she'd thankfully asked me about my head and my neck rather than my ribs. And there was a spot coming up in the match where I was needed so I was like, I gotta go."

On what was going through his mind when he got back in the match:

"Just what's the next thing? Okay, it's a big back body drop. Not ideal. But the one thing that I did change in the match, and Dom is going to kill me for telling this story. The finishing stretch that we talked about. I said it would be cool if we could do 619, you tag me in, I'll do a 450, I'll bounce off and I'll tag you in, you hit the Frog Splash. It'll be like our super finisher. We're super late in the match now so I have no energy left whatsoever, no air left. I tried to say to him, 'I can't do the 450.' He didn't hear me. He’s taken off for the 619 Please, God, just let him go up for the Frog Splash. He hit the 619 he runs across to me no, no! He tagged me in. So the one modification I made was I knew I'd really hurt myself if I did the 450 and I've done that moonsalt probably 10,000 times, and I knew I could kind of protect myself a little. And Ivar is a big guy, big landing pad. So I thought this is gonna be the last big move that I do. I'll make it a good one, and get out of here."

On after the match:

"So we got back behind, not even to the curtain. I had my arms over Dom and Carlito coming up the aisle way, and that was really hurting me. But I couldn't take my hands off them or I would have fallen down. I didn't want to fall down in Gorilla because there was loads of people waiting to go out to the next match, and you don't want to sell for anybody in the office. So I just lay down on the other side of the curtain, thinking that I was out of the eyeline of people, but I was in view of the fans. They caught a photo of my feet sticking out into the entrance way they said JD has just collapsed backstage. But I just had to lie down and catch my breath. It wasn't a full collapse."

On the possibility it could have been his last match:

"No, I don't [think about that] because I understand the risks that we take being a wrestler. I've been doing this for 22 years now, 23 years in September. So I know. I have seen people wiping out and losing their careers. I know that's something that you gamble with every time you go through the curtain, but if you were thinking about it often, I think you'd psych yourself out." 

On his current road to recovery:

"I’ve been in the gym. I was doing skipping and really low impact cardio for a couple of weeks, and now I've kind of progressed in doing Pilates and other non-impactful. So I haven't taken a bump yet. That'll be the next step. Get back in the ring, hit the ropes. See if that hurts. Take a bump. See if that hurts."

On when he hopes to be back:

"I'd love to be back yesterday. I'm so bored sitting at home watching the guys traveling around, I’m so jealous. They're going to Europe this week. They're doing Madison Square Garden on Monday, and then jetting off to Europe. So if I could be back, I'd be back right now. Hopefully, I'm going to put a time frame on it and say within a month I hope to be back, that's what I'm working towards. So whether that happens or not, whether the WWE docs align, that we'll see."

On how he became a part of Judgment Day:

"I was just told when I came up to the main roster we're gonna have you brush off Judgment Day, and that'll be the way that we introduce you, and we'll see what way the fans take it. There was the link there between me and Finn that we could work with, but I don't think there was [a plan of] we're bringing JD from NXT, and we've got this spot in Judgment Day for him. I think it was just kind of that was the in for me. I had good chemistry with most of the group, all of the group really, to be honest, and it just seemed like a good fit. And I ended up getting inducted by Priest."

On the European wrestling style:

"I think we focus more on the actual mechanics of wrestling and manipulating body parts and we all know what it's like to be in a real fight and to move somebody around. I had never cut a promo in my first 10-12 years of wrestling. I was just a guy on the card, just in one-off, individual singles matches. I didn't need to learn how to tell a story until I was doing LGT in my 13th, 14th year of wrestling. I didn't need to. It was just about having a wrestling match, an exhibition. That's just the style of wrestling, certainly in Ireland and probably across the UK and Europe as well. There was less showmanship."

On if WWE may have not been possible:

"Definitely, yeah. WWE was always the dream end goal. But I wanted to finance my life through wrestling. I didn't want to ever get a real job, whatever form that took. I finally get my break and it all came through just sticking to the plan. Just keep on going. Keep on trying to have the best match on the card. See where it takes you. I don't think too far ahead."

On getting to WWE:

"So NXT UK opened up in late 2016 and we had the UK tournament in January 2017. In my WWE debut I split Danny Burch’s head open at the finish. I gave him a super kick and he fell and hit his head off the canvas. Bust himself open, and I was pulling him out. We were just about to go to the finish. I pulled him out by the ankle and the ref saw the pool of blood, and I saw the pool of blood, and the ref goes stay down or pin him. This is the finish, you gotta go home. I said, Okay, stay down. And I pinned him as hard as I could. And the ref goes, one, two, and he kicked out, and the ref counted three. The place booed, was the worst possible debut that you've ever seen. I came backstage, I was like, Oh my God I'm never gonna wrestle here again, waited all my life for this. But yeah, it is always worse in your own head. Danny was super cool about it. Everybody else was super cool about it. We moved on."

On what happened next:

"I just moved up through the ranks of everywhere I've been. I came in NXT UK with that start, and I was like okay I gotta prove myself now that I'm not this heavy-handed, clumsy guy. I gotta put together a body of work here that people will take notice of. Then I kind of worked my way up through the ranks of NXT UK, until I was doing my events with Ilja Dragunov for the UK title. Then the opportunity to go over to America, I won the Cruiserweight title a week after NXT TakeOver Blackpool, I had a really good one with Tyler Bate. I remember off the back of that loss, that was the match that they decided we can do something with this guy. They brought me over to Houston for Worlds Collide, and I won the Cruiserweight title. That was January 2020, and my career was about to take off. And then COVID happened, and I was sidelined for about nine months."

On winning the Tag Team Championships with Finn Balor:

"I said to you earlier WWE was the goal. But if you had to put a gun to my head when I was 14 years old and said, What's your ultimate fantasy dream in wrestling? I would have said, win the Tag Titles with Finn. Honestly, so I looked up to him a lot because obviously the age difference. He's 9-10 years older than me, and he's lit the way for me in a lot of ways, showing me that it is possible. I felt kind of for a long time I was chasing him, trying to catch up to him. He did Japan, so I did Japan a few years later. He made it to America, and it took me a little while but I made it to America, and then for it all to kind of culminate with being his partner and lifting the Tag Team Titles together. It was super hard for me. I feel like, if I talk about it for too long, I'll get emotional. It was so, so fulfilling and such a full circle moment for me on him training me. He felt the same way about it."

On the RKO from the top of the WarGames cage:

"Yeah, that was my idea. My first idea was I was going to moonsault off the cage and they said, No you can't do that. Charlotte's gonna do that. I said, Okay, well then in that case, I have a slightly more dangerous suggestion. I said super RKO, and they asked do you think you can do it safely? I'd have to eyeball it. I'd have to get up there onto the cage and see the height and see, but I reckon I could. When we were coming through, when I was 12 or 13, you're just a kid, you learn how to bump and hit a crash mat or whatever. We used to have a game where we would try and jump from ascending heights and put our hands behind our back and just take the flat crash mat. So you'd start standing, might go to the bottom rope, the second rope, the top rope, we'd be like pushing each other and daring each other to go higher and higher. At the end of it, I was jumping off a ladder in the ring onto the crash mat on the floor, and hooking my hands behind my back. So honestly, it felt like that when I was up there on the cage just about to do it, and Randy's walking over. He's eyeing me up and stuff. I thought about all those bumps that I took, I was okay. Just do it like that. Just put your hands behind your back and leave your head out there for something for him to grab and, yeah, thank God it came off great." 

On if Randy Orton knew it could be done safely:

"We got a crash mat out the night before. I hate blowing up the secrets in wrestling but we got a crash night out, he stood at the end of it, I got up on the cage and just jumped off. He eyeballed and he goes, I got you. I bet you do. All right, let's do it tomorrow. The lights are on."

On changing his name:

"They're not too happy with you having your birth name as your wrestling. I kept it as close to home as possible. McDonagh is my mother's maiden name, and then JD is Jordan Devlin."

On if R-Truth has made him break character:

"He's come close, especially on the live events. I'll try and keep it together as much as I can on camera. I'm better than Priest at it. Priest was cracking up every single week."

On how his lung was repaired:

"So they take a tube that's about the diameter of your little finger, they poke a hole in between your ribs, and they stab it into your chest cavity, because the lung had come away from the chest cavity and collapsed, they need to suck all the blood and air that's leaking from your lung in your chest cavity out so that your lung can expand and stick back to the wall of your chest. So I was on this suction pump pulling all the blood and air out for a day, obviously shallow breaths, like half lung fulls, and then they change it to a different machine with a lower form of suction, so there's less suction, helping my lungs stay inflated. They're saying if it would stay up. Did that for another day, and then they took me off the machine, took the tubes out, and my lungs stayed inflated and stayed stuck to my chest cavity. So they let me go home [from hospital]. I was blessed by the way. We were in Atlanta, Georgia, the next state up from Florida. If I had been in Colorado, I'd still be driving home because I couldn't fly. My lung would have popped." 

What is JD McDonagh grateful for?

"That I stuck it out, my parents and my wife."