Danny Burch recently spoke with the Cafe de Rene podcast for an interview, where he shed some light on how WWE absolutely looked at AEW as competition for NXT, despite claiming the opposite.
The following are some of the highlights.
On Shawn Michaels saying AEW was just wrestlers that WWE and NXT didn’t want: “It wasn’t until AEW got announced that [NXT] were like, ‘Yeah, this is the greatest day ever! We’re going live!’ And it was obviously an attempt to try and compete with AEW. It was always funny because everyone’s like, ‘Man, we’re going to crush them.’ Because Shawn [Michaels] used to say, ‘Oh well, you’re just working guys that we didn’t want,’ and blah, blah. And I’m sitting there in the back thinking, ‘Well, actually, no. Technically, we’re going up against the likes of Chris Jericho and people like that.’ And they weren’t concerned with what we were doing.”
On NXT changing things based on what AEW was doing: “We would have two TVs in Gorilla, and they would be watching AEW, and then they would be trying to change the show to compete with what they were doing. I’ll never forget, me and my tag partner [Oney Lorcan]. We were scheduled to have a 30-minute main event, and I was really excited about it. We had three segments. We’re the Tag Champs, we were gonna get to go out there and really kill it. And then because they were watching [AEW Dynamite] and they heard that there was a women’s match on first, they cut us to 10 minutes with entrances and said, ‘You guys are gonna go on first so we can steal the opening.’ So when they turned around said, ‘We were never in competition,’ you’re full of it. Yes, you were.”
Check out the complete Danny Burch interview below.
