AEW Continental Champion Eddie Kingston recently appeared as a guest on the ESPR podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Kingston commented on the toxicity of social media from wrestling fans:
“Twitter’s just not healthy, man. I usually ignore Twitter because everybody does the same low hanging fruit jokes or whatever, and that’s fine. I’m also the same guy that’s like, if you don’t like it, then don’t watch. I don’t care. I get paid the same. You not watching does not affect me. I’m in the ring and doing my thing. Why does that affect you? To me, I go, ‘Spmething’s wrong with your life. You need some help.’”
‘I saw something that someone wrote, something real nasty about Riho, one of the wrestlers in AEW. I was just like, ‘Oh, this is gross. It was someone who just decided to open up a Twitter that day just to say something nasty. They had like the little egg on it or whatever. I was like, this dude took time out of his day to make a profile page just to write this nasty stuff. I was like, I’m done, and I deleted the app and I was like, I’m over it. You know, to me, that was ugly and I didn’t want to be associated with that ugliness.”
The tribalism among wrestling fans:
“I understand it because when I was a fan, I was all about ECW and screw everybody else, but I never said I want a place to close. To me, when you sit there and say, ‘I hope AEW closes or WWE closes or whatever’, to me, you’re a nasty human being because people are losing their jobs. People with families are losing their jobs. This has nothing to do with tribalism, or whatever. This is you being nasty and not understanding what life’s about, and to me, that’s wrong. I’m a Yankee fan, but I don’t hope the Red Sox players get hurt or injured or whatever.”
“I’m a fan of AEW. I’m gonna say everybody else sucks, even though it’s not true, just like people in WWE will say AEW sucks and theirs is the best and that’s it. You stick with your team. That’s it, but I don’t want no one to close because I actually got a couple of people who I consider friends over at WWE. I don’t want them to lose their job. They got a wife and kids. I want them to feed their family. Those guys don’t want me to lose a job. These fans don’t get that. We’re all pulling for each other. We want everybody to eat, but we want our people to eat first, and eat more (he laughs). That’s it, but everybody else can eat.”
If bosses should stay of certain social media accounts:
“To me, you do what you want to do. It ain’t my business. You know what I’m saying? That’s the thing I think a lot of us have forgotten, the lessons that we learned as kids like, you know, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say it at all. Don’t be a tattletale. You know what I mean. Just simple things like that that we learned as kids. Growing up in New York, I was always taught to mind your own business. Don’t worry about nobody else’s stuff. Worry about your house. Clean your house first before you try to do anything with anybody else.”
You can check out the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
