Born in Boston as Eric Maher, Eddie Edwards has spent most of his wrestling career racking up championships. His list of titles is absurdly long, so much so that it’s almost an act of futility to try and list them all.
We’ll give it a brief shot, though, focusing on the various leagues where Edwards made his rep. The now 36- year old Edwards made his debut in 20002, competing mostly in an ongoing series of independent promotions. The following year, he became first Millennium Wrestling Federation Television Champion.
In 2007, he began wrestling for Squared Circle Wrestling, where he made a name for himself and was eventually part of a tag team championship outfit.
After that the titles came fast and furious. Edwards spent eight years with Pro Wrestling Noah, where he honed his skills and turned some early losses into an ongoing series of victories. In 2017, he became the first American to win the GHC Heavyweight Championship in Japan.
Edwards also competed in parallel in the Ring of Honor from 2006-2013. He became a member of the American Wolves, but during the end of that stretch he began to focus on singles competition, which also led to a string of successes.
The following decade, Edwards became a staple in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla matches, and he also appeared briefly in the WWE in 2013.
He returned to tag team wrestling with Total Nonstop Action Wrestling/Impact Wrestling, and several years after that he began racking up singles championships, winning his first in the TNA X Division.
There is plenty of tarnish on the trophies, however, depending on how you look at Edwards’ persona and the antics that come with it.
For better or worse, many wrestling fans know Edwards for his more recent, over-the-top gimmick of using barbed baseball bat and then a kendo stick. This started on Sami Callahan, who sent Edwards to the hospital during a post-match Impact Wrestling brawl when a baseball bat accidentally struck Edwards in the head.
The kendo stick, which Edwards named “Kenny,” became a staple of Edwards wrestling repertoire, with various staged feuds with the likes of
Davey Richards that invariably led to all kinds of unsightly mayhem.
He accidentally hurt his wife, Alisha, during a House of Hardcore episode, and Edwards’ act became part of the plots and subplots that were at the heart of many Impact Wrestling matches.
His stage persona eventually paid off, though. In 2019, Edwards signed a multi-year deal with Impact, and this summer he repeated as the winner of the renamed Impact title.
Edwards may have taken on the personality of a madman, but it clearly hasn’t hurt him financially. He’s used his supposed loss of sanity as a lucrative trick that will clearly keep him smiling all the way to the bank.