WWE Superstar Randy Orton is one of the biggest names in all of pro-wrestling, and he has been a big star for WWE for the last couple of years. In late 2014, a big Vine campaign with Orton started with his “RKO outta nowhere” moniker involved which has only gotten more and more popular. This had him RKOing unexpecting people in random videos as edited by the vine user. It was funny to see, and it became a huge hit online. WWE even capitalized on it by creating some merchandise with the RKO usage.

Orton has started to slowly creep toward a lighter schedule, and all of this started to become a hit around the time he was taking time off, which only made his return even bigger. The idea for Orton was that he would take some time off here and there, and have a similar schedule to what Shawn Michaels had toward the later part of his career. With his past full of injuries, it made sense for Orton to have this time. Sadly Orton was hurt recently, costing him to need shoulder surgery.

Orton has had work done on his shoulders and areas near it before. He has hypermobile shoulders which cause the shoulders to go too far back. This is one of the main reasons he has the snake look in the ring. Orton hurt himself taking out the trash at home which made most believe that he would need to have a simple surgery at the worst and be back in time for WrestleMania 32.

via WWE

It now looks like that is out of the cards. The Wrestling Observer reported earlier in the week that Orton may miss far more time than expected. Ric Flair then confirmed those reports on his WOOOOO! Nation Podcast. He said that Orton would be out of action from WWE indefinitely as it looks like he’ll be having neck surgery along with the needed shoulder surgery.

Flair didn’t go into any other major details, but did mention that it is likely Orton might need neck fusion surgery. This would put his time away from WWE at a much longer point. He would miss a year of action after the surgery. This would keep Orton out of action until mid-2017 at the very earliest. The reason for this is that it would be unlikely that they would do both the shoulder and neck surgery at the same time as both take significant time to recover from. So it is likely that he will have his shoulder worked on and then have his neck surgery after the recovery from the shoulder surgery.

It then takes a little over a year to recover and get cleared to return to the ring from this type of surgery

via WWE

This is of course if the neck fusion surgery is needed. If he has a less complex surgery on his neck, that still puts him out a while. Regardless of the neck surgery he has, he will not be back until the end of next year at best. However, it is still quite likely that you may not see him wrestle again until WrestleMania 33 or sometime near it.

This comes as no surprise to some as it was thought that Randy Orton was working through a lot of injuries. Most thought that it was just his shoulder issue that was causing him grief, but his neck was not in the cards. Losing Orton for this period of time is a huge loss for the company. Randy brings them a great veteran presence that the company can throw into a rivalry of any kind at any time and make work.

Randy Orton can be the first or last match, the mid-carder or the main eventer. He can do it all and that is by no means an easy thing to replace. He will be missed by WWE fans while he’s out, but most believe this is not career threatening.

[Image via WWE]