AEW star Bryan Danielson recently spoke with PWInsider.com on a number of topics including how AEW President and CEO Tony Khan told him if anything were to ever happen to him, then Danielson should be put in charge of AEW creative.
Danielson said, “It was really funny. He actually told me that he had said that to his dad maybe… Yeah. Or maybe he had told me that he said it in an interview. And I was a little bit blown away because I was like, “Oh, I’m just kind of hanging out.” I mean, I love doing my thing and I help people and all that kind of stuff. And Tony and I would have good conversations or whatever, but I wasn’t really that helpful. I was like, “Oh, okay.” And then he asked me like, yeah. He asked me to talk to a couple of the lawyers within AEW and start being like, “Okay, we’d like you to try to do this or try to do that or try to do these other things.” Because, heaven forbid, something does happen to Tony, there’s nobody else who even understands a fraction of how AEW works the way that Tony does, right? And so I think that was… It was really interesting and a little bit jarring for me when he said it but also that makes you feel respected, that makes you feel good about yourself when your boss thinks that about you.”
Danielson added that Khan might have the smartest wrestling mind he’s ever seen because he does majority of AEW’s booking on his own compared to other promoters.
“So I think from a purely wrestling booking standpoint, Tony might be the smartest wrestling mind I’ve ever seen. And what I mean by that is his… So he does most of the rest of AEW’s booking on his own, right? He’ll reach out to talent to get their feedback or their ideas or whatever it is and sometimes he’ll run ideas by me. But most of these things that are coming across on this show, most of these are Tony’s ideas, right, versus the time I was in WWE, you have a crew of 30 writers coming up with ideas who are then pitching them to say Vince or whatever it is and then he gets to pick and choose or come up with his own idea, right? It’s different than facing the blank page. Now Gabe Sapolsky was a little bit different, right? I don’t know how many shows we would do a year at Ring of Honor, but say we did 40 shows a year at Ring of Honor, doing 42 DVD products a year is different from doing five hours of television every week and doing it mostly on your own. The idea that he’s still doing that and doing it mostly on his own with input from other people, I mean, hey, nobody exists in a vacuum, right? But it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in the sense of his recall. His recall and his memory is incredible for the things that we’ve done on the show, nothing… I don’t want to say nothing. Very few things get forgotten. You know what I mean? And his ability to recall those things is really impressive. And obviously, and this is one of the things that I think me and so many other people in AEW love about Tony is that it’s very apparent how much he loves pro wrestling. Still after now coming up on four years of running this wild, crazy pro wrestling show, he loves wrestling still.”
Danielson also spoke about how he wants his wrestling career to end.
Danielson said, “A little bit but I also try not to map out too many things because the landscape of professional wrestling is always changing and by doing… Having ideas in your head is great, right, but being stuck to those ideas is not healthy. So yeah. That’s one of the things that I have some ideas of how I would like it to end but none of those are set in stone and I’m pretty much open to anything. My biggest thing is to enjoy this last year. Enjoy not only just the wrestling but enjoy being around my friends, right? Because honestly, once you kind of leave wrestling, you’re not in contact with them as much anymore, right? These people that you’ve loved and I’ve turned into an adult and a father with these people, right? I first met Claudio, I’ve known Claudio for 20 years plus now, right? And so we were kids when we first met essentially and then now we’re both fathers and grown adults, right? So just appreciating these people that I love so much that I get to be around on a weekly basis.”
