AEW President and CEO Tony Khan recently spoke with Going Ringside about a range of topics, including the origins of the company and the process of launching it. Khan discussed how he pitched the idea of starting a new wrestling promotion to the President of TBS and TNT, ultimately leading to the realization of AEW.
Khan said, “Well, I didn’t know those wrestlers, and I didn’t have that kind of connection to start this. When I launched it, I was in LA. I was at a cocktail party and I saw the president at the time of TBS and TNT, and I knew it, and I went up to him and said, ‘With the way wrestling TV rights are going, I think it would make a lot of sense for us to start a wrestling league.’ And I would put the shows on TBS and TNT. At the time, there was no wrestling on TBS or TNT, but there had been for many years. There’s a great history of wrestling from about 1971 to 2001 on TBS and from the mid-90s about 95 to 2001 on TNT. But neither network had hosted any wrestling for the — you know — for almost 20 years. When we started, and it was 2018 when I went to the president of TBS and TNT and said, ‘Let’s look at this,’ and he took it seriously.”
On how it took a year of meetings:
“We had a lot of meetings. It was over a year before anything really happened, but it was a lot of meetings. And I started to realize there’s definitely a market for this. I began signing up the wrestlers. It was a major commitment, and it actually was a bit of a gamble because I started signing the wrestlers before I had the TV deal, because I could feel the TV deal was coming and that there was a market for what AEW was going to do. So, in January of 2019, we announced the launch of AEW. We announced that we had signed a bunch of star wrestlers. It was January 8th, like literally meters, like feet away from where I am right now in Jacksonville, right outside of my office, where it was actually the first ever AEW press conference.”
On announcing the launch of AEW in January 2019:
“We announced the launch of the promotion. We had a party with the fans, and we had a great celebration. We set off pyro in the parking lot, and we launched AEW and put eyes of the wrestling world here in Jacksonville. And then we went and took our opportunity, and we did the very first AEW event, Double or Nothing, in 2019. We set up with our very first episode of Wednesday Night Dynamite in October. Like I said, the six-year anniversary of the first Dynamite is actually this week, this Wednesday on TBS at 8:00.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
