Swerve Strickland was very complimentary of his tag team partner Keith Lee ahead of their title defense against The Acclaimed at AEW Dynamite: Grand Slam.
(Now-former) one-half of the AEW World Tag Team Champions Swerve Strickland was the latest guest on Under The Ring to discuss a wide variety of subjects. When talking about how Swerve in our Glory operates as a tag team, Swerve believes the two men complement each other very well.
“We need each other in a lot of situations in the ring,” Swerve Strickland said. “There’s a lot of things he can do that I can’t. And there’s a lot of things that I can do that he can’t. But there’s a lot of things we both can do. But the fact that he relies on me to do them and I rely on him to do them, and we don’t try to like butt heads and clash, we’re both trying to accomplish the same thing and the same metric, and that’s where like a lot of tag teams like you get like splits and go singles and stuff like that.
“We’re both single stars. But we had to put the single stars [mentality] aside to become a team and understand like, ‘Hey, I could do this, but I have you here to do this for us. Not for me, not for you. But for us,’ and we rely on that. I can deadlift people, but why would I need to deadlift when I have Keith Lee, who is 360 pounds right here that can do that, and I can provide another service to the team outside the ring on the top rope, sliding around the way I do, grappling. Keith Lee can grapple, but I’m more ground submission-based, military combative grappling, and so I can provide that to the team.
“And it’s just like understanding the contrast and blending those things together. Understanding like, I’m not going to change Keith, you know, I can’t do that. He’s not going to change me. I have the mentality and the attitude that I do for a reason. That’s why I got here, and that’s part of the reason why we’re successful. I’ll do some of the things that Keith that’s not his forte, I’ll say some things in the Media Scrum, and I’ll say things in promos, or I’ll go out and interrupt The Acclaimed, but Keith Lee wouldn’t do that.
“So there’s almost like the opposites make us who we are. And Keith is very eloquent with the way he speaks. Sometimes I’m just more blatant. We’re saying the same thing. Mine is a little louder and a little straightforward and gets straight to the point. But you need that so we have a good cop bad cop mentality going on as a team, but it’s worked for us for very quite a while now, like five months. It’s been working; we had some bumps on the road, but we got past it. The best teams in the world, they figure out how to adapt after facing adversity. And we’ve done that. I feel like no team in the wrestling world has done that better than us.”
Swerve In Our Glory lost the AEW Tag Team Championship to The Acclaimed on Wednesday night. Check out full results from the AEW Dynamite: Grand Slam event here.
READ MORE: Swerve Strickland: I’m Proud Of Our Rivalry With The Acclaimed, We Captured Lightning In A Bottle
What do you make of Swerve Strickland’s comments? Do you think Swerve In Our Glory complements one another as a tag team? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
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