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Karrion Kross is ready to unleash the pain in his first-ever No Disqualification Match in WWE. The former NXT Champion will take on reigning NXT Cruiserweight Champion Santos Escobar on tonight's episode of NXT on the USA Network.
Both men have been on an absolute tear since joining WWE last spring. Outside of a shoulder injury that sidelined him for more than three months, Karrion Kross has had a storybook start to his WWE tenure. He'll look to stay undefeated tonight against Escobar and he believes the No DQ stipulation will play right into his hands. He told SK Wrestling this week that WWE fans are about to see him inside his ballpark.
"Now I can just do whatever I want. There's going to be no repercussions. If people are looking for violence, they're going to get it."
This will be Karrion Kross' fourth match since returning from a separated shoulder injury in December. Call it a cliché if you want to, but Kross says he feels better than ever and is ready to prove it against Escobar.
"I feel like the injury never even happened. I came out a lot better than I thought I was going to be out of that situation, but the ligaments completely blew off the bone when that injury happened. I had no idea what that was going to be like coming back. But I (have) full stability back in my shoulder, full strength. I'm doing handstands and military press. I had zero issues with it. So I'm definitely feeling very good. I could put this shoulder through the back of his (Escobar) head, which is probably what I'm going to be looking forward to this Wednesday."
Win, lose, or draw tonight for Karrion Kross, the real victory for him came last year. This match-up with Santos Escobar was never supposed to happen now.
Karrion Kross beat the odds with a hellacious rehab process
Karrion Kross is truly a medical miracle. After tearing the ligaments clean off his shoulder, Kross returned to the WWE after only a three-month hiatus. He told SK Wrestling he went through a grueling rehab process to accomplish that feat.
"It was pretty vicious. I decided to do a lot of extra curricular rehabbing as well on my shoulder. So I would go into WWE medical and they would put me through a very rigorous process of rebuilding stability and getting the inflamation down in the joint. When I came home, I would bring all of the equipment that they would give me to use and I would do it three to four times a day. It wasn't necessary to do that, but I wanted to come back as quickly as possible."
Karrion Kross sustained that shoulder injury at NXT TakeOver XXX during his match with Keith Lee. When it initially happened, doctors gave him several different time projections for when he'd be ready to return to action. They were all anywhere from six months to a year.
He may have been forced to relinquish his newly won NXT Championship, but Karrion Kross went straight to work and crushed those rehab expectations.
"I was like, 'there's no way that's happening.' I opted out of surgery. I took a holistic approach. I went on a very clean diet. I changed everything. I put all the time that I would normally put into training into my rehab process and compressed that eight to 12 month window down to three months with no surgery. So I'm very proud of that. It was really hard. It was really, really hard."
Now that he's fully healthy, don't think for one second that Karrion Kross has forgotten about that NXT Championship that he never lost. He told SK Wrestling that he is waiting for the right time to strike. However, before he sets his sights on Finn Balor, he has business to conduct tonight with Santos Escobar.
Make sure to check out PART ONE of SK Wrestling's conversation with Karrion Kross in the video above, and be on the lookout for PART TWO dropping later today on the SK Wrestling YouTube Channel.
