Tony Khan wants to try and change the perception of why matches take place in the world of professional wrestling.
All Elite Wrestling owner Tony Khan was a guest this morning on Busted Open Radio with Dave LaGreca, Tommy Dreamer, and Mickie James to discuss a wide variety of subjects. When speaking about the variety of storylines currently taking place on AEW Dynamite, Khan spoke about Eric Bischoff’s current criticism about matches happening on the show for no reason.
“There’s a lot of really interesting stories happening in AEW, and there’s this fascinating thing happening — I’ve noted that the perception has changed in how a wrestling card is built over the years,” Tony Khan said. “And now there’s this perception, and I think this is because it’s how people have seen it done for most of the last twenty years, so I understand that it’s become, to some extent, an industry standard, if only for a lack of competition.
“And there’s this perception that every match on every show should have a long storyline built into why it takes place, and it’s not necessarily the case for every single match. I think that there’s absolutely some story in most of the matches on this show and most of the matches on a lot of our shows, but sometimes you can see when it’s the start of a new issue…
“Frankly, the person who I think has been the most incendiary and contradictory and hypocritical on this entire point has been Eric Bischoff, who if you watch Nitro — especially the good Nitros from like ’95 to ’98 — a lot of quality of the show was seeing Lucha matches and things that you didn’t expect, a certain exquisite randomness to the lineup of the card.
“You turn the show on, and it’d be like, oh, there’s Rick Martel versus Perry Saturn, that’s pretty cool, or Randy Savage versus Bobby Eaton, OK. [There were] various Lucha matches that didn’t necessarily have build-up, but they were fun matches. They weren’t the big story matches. There were a lot stories happening in WCW, but probably less than half the matches on Nitro had a story going into them, and that was fine.
“It was the industry standard show. And then it really tried to copy its competition and really put lots of story where every match had a story with two guys in a fight over a cup of coffee in catering, and that just doesn’t need to be the case. Sometimes it’s as simple as a challenge or two people fighting to be the best. This perception that you can’t just have two people come in and fight… it could be the start of something. It could lead to something with two completely different people; who knows?
“But there’s a lot of different ways to skin a cat, and in this case, to see the person that probably put more cold matches on TV — and did it well and did it successfully — say it’s an abomination? It’s pretty contradictory, so I found it really ironic when I heard Eric Bischoff talking about ‘Why is this match happening?’ Why did 60% of the matches on Nitro happen? And that was when Nitro was a better show, and they tried to change it to something else.”
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What do you make of Tony Khan’s comments? Do you think Eric Bischoff ran a lot of matches for no reason during the height of WCW Nitro? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
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