WWE News: Edge Retires

With the announcement of Edge's retirement this past Monday on Raw, both the WWE as a company and it's millions of fans have lost one of the greatest wrestlers in the past few decades too soon due to injury.

As Edge himself has stated many times, since he was a child he wanted to become a WWE wrestler, and he accomplished that much and then some.

"The Rated-R Superstar" has been a part of wrestling fans lives for the better part of the last two decades, and over that time he has accumulated more championships than anyone who ever walked into a WWE ring.

More importantly, he earned every opportunity at those titles due to his body of work.

You don't have to be a wrestling fanatic to notice that when watching an Edge match, he didn't just go through the motions, and very rarely did he botch a move; he gave it his all week in and week out.

He sold every bump he took and every spear he delivered, always making the audience feel a great amount of realism during his matches.

Edge was masterful at selling a match to the greatest of his ability, but he was what many wrestling historians and analysts would call the "complete package" because of the fact he had the in-ring talent along with the microphone skills to keep a storyline fresh without having to be in the ring every week.

As the Canadian born superstar alluded to during his retirement speech, his character has changed drastically during his 15 years in the WWE.

It's one thing to change the gimmick associated with your character, it's a whole other thing to be able to sell the change to the audience.

Whenever Edge went from face to heel, or tag team specialist and funny man to "The Rated-R Superstar", it made sense and the fans bought it.

It was during those two specific periods in his career that Edge made perhaps some of his most lasting marks on the WWE and the wrestling industry in general.

It was during his tag team days that both he and Christian, as well as Matt and Jeff Hardy, would take the idea of the ladder match to the heights it is today.

Perhaps Shawn Michaels vs Razor Ramon was the WWE's first ladder match, but one could make the argument that any of the Edge and Christian versus the Hardy Boyz ladder matches were better, considering the multiple risks taken by the four wrestlers in each of these dangerous contests.

It would be during his time nicknamed the "Rated-R Superstar" that Edge would have perhaps his greatest rivalry of his career with John Cena.

This rivalry brought the best out of each superstar and had one of the richest storylines of the past decade.

It contained live sex celebrations, someone landing in the Long Island Sound and a few changes in design of the WWE title, all leading up to that memorable TLC match at Unforgiven.

Edge's body of work with his countless title reigns will not soon be forgotten, and it puts him up there with the greatest Canadian and WWE wrestlers of all time.