AEW star Mike Bailey spoke with Sean Ross Sapp from Fightful about various topics, including any issues he has with wrestling barefoot.
Bailey said, “No, I don’t. I have very few feet issues. I mean, I’ve hurt some toes. I think I’ve broken some toes, but I just pop them back in. It’s the kind of thing where it’s not gonna get worse. If you break a toe and you snap it back, you can’t break it more. It’s just gonna heal and be fine. Back in my Taekwondo days, I would have chronic turf toe, just feet constantly bruised from kicking elbows.”
On the advantages of wrestling without boots:
“But it is easily outweighed by the advantages of wrestling barefoot for me. The main one that people don’t think of is ropes. When I’m standing on the top rope and I can grab the rope with my toes and when I do a springboard, you can see my feet curl around the rope and I get extra balance that way. I love wrestling barefoot and I’m glad that I get to do it in a place like All Elite Wrestling that actually embraces the individuality of the wrestlers and that’s something that’s very important for me. Again, the emphasis is on letting the wrestlers be the best and that includes being the best versions of themselves, which, in my case, is wrestling without boots or shoes.”
On not taking his shoes off backstage:
“I don’t take off my shoes backstage. I’m usually in flip flops. I try to try to keep my best, and of course, you have to keep them clean. But also it’s funny because I think what I’m doing is a lot more sanitary than the wrestlers who will wear their boots backstage, go to the urinal in boots and then stomp you in the face in the middle of the ring and no one bats an eye. No one disinfects their wrestling boots before a match. I think it’s fair. I don’t think we have to. I’ve not had any facial infections from dirty wrestling boots and I don’t know why my bare feet would be more of a concern, where I think it’s in fact less.”
On how being barefoot slows him down in the ring:
“This is absolutely correct. However, one issue, I don’t think I can run as fast. I think I can run faster barefoot than the people in the thick boots. But I think people who wrestle in running shoes, some wrestling shoes with very grippy soles, I think that can help, especially depending on the canvas. If you have a brand new canvas or that has a painted logo, sometimes that gets really tricky. If you’ve ever wrestled on one of those vinyl canvases. Those can get terrible. They can get slippery, they can get wet just from it gets cooler as the show goes on, condensation happens and it just becomes a puddle. That can be an issue. Also, one thing that I’ve done before which is wrestle on a vinyl canvas in the blistering summer heat. That was incredibly unpleasant for my feet. In fact, if you look on YouTube You can find a match of mine, which was the last match that I wore in shoes, which was the debut match of Zak Patterson, an excellent pro wrestler out of Quebec. But it was outside in the summer on a black vinyl canvas, and I got in the ring barefoot, and I was like, ‘Nope, not gonna do it,’ and I just wrestled with kick pads and running shoes that day.”
You can check out Bailey’s comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
