Matt Taven was a call-in guest on Sports Guys Talking Wrestling with Stew Myrick and Justin Simmons down in Austin, TX as the ROH World Champion is set to defend the belt against Jeff Cobb tonight at ROH Best In The World tonight in Baltimore. The King of The Kingdom calls out Cobb and also talks in detail about the surreal moment of winning the ROH strap in Madison Square Garden.
Matt Taven on being one of the few wrestlers to win a world title at Madison Square Garden, and how it still feels like this is ‘someone else’s story’ sometimes:
“When I talk about it it still feels like I’m reading from a book of history that’s happened at The Garden. It’s hard to really kind of say that like, ‘No that was you. That was you that was in there. That was you that did it. You are the champion, it happened in Madison Square,’ and even that day was so overwhelming, walking in, seeing that ceiling.
Thankfully, it was a very busy day, having to figure out you know, walk through some of my entrance and stuff like that, so you didn’t have too much time to get overwhelmed by the situation. You’re so amped up and once I went out there it was game time, it was time to go to work, but man, that moment of pulling down that title and looking around MSG and seeing the lights swirl around, it is something that you know, it’s the greatest accomplishment of my life so far. It’s hard to sit back and rest on that because the train keeps on rolling, so I’m sure one day I’ll be able to sit on a porch and reminisce and enjoy that memory a lot more, but right now it definitely still seems like you know, something that I’m looking at instead of reliving.”
On taking on Jeff Cobb at Best In The World and if he considers this his toughest title defense to date:
“I mean it’s gotta be up there, but I’ve had a couple of title defenses so it seems like it’s hard to kind of put one over the other, especially when you have guys like PCO, Mark Haskins, Flip Gordon, Tracey Williams, those four guys alone are so drastically different. Now you throw Jeff Cobb in the mix and it’s like Ring Of Honor—I talked forever about a conspiracy against me in Ring Of Honor, and now it seems like they’re trying desperately to do anything to get this title off of me. They didn’t want me to win it in the first place, which I truly believe they never did. So here I am, scrapping and clawing just like I did this entire time to get here, and it hasn’t got any easier.
Jeff Cobb needs to realize that I’ve worked for eleven years of my life for this title and in the six years I was in Ring Of Honor, I constantly felt like, ‘If I was just given the opportunity, I would succeed.’ It would be over my dead body that some, you know, ‘Jeff Slob’, who’s an Olympian, comes strolling into Ring of Honor and thinks he’s going to take what I worked for, absolutely not. Jeff Cobb might have all the credentials in the world, but he’s in there with a man that will do absolutely anything. He’s gonna trap a rat in the corner and he’s gonna watch this rat bite him. So unless Jeff Cobb is planning on ending Matt Taven all together he is going to walk out of Baltimore a loser.”
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone)
Matt Taven also talks about his podcast, the “Take A Bump Podcast,” as well as being the owner of a hairy cat. Listen to the full episode below:
