AEW star Anthony Bowens from The Acclaimed recently spoke with Wrestling Inc. to hype up this Sunday’s ALL OUT pay-per-view, where he and Max Caster will be challenging Swerve In Your Glory (Swerve Strickland & Keith Lee) for the AEW tag team titles.
During the interview, Bowens discussed his first chat with Tony Khan and how he convinced him to join the company instead of going elsewhere. Highlights can be found below.
On challenging for the tag team titles at ALL OUT:
Incredible competitors. It’s going to be tough. Keith Lee is massive. We got to figure out a way to get the big man off his feet, and Swerve, he’s all over the place. So we got to figure out a strategy to keep these guys down and contained. You said two singles wrestlers, and we saw before in the past that they’ve had a little weird tension. Maybe they made up, I don’t know. I don’t know how that’s going to come into play. If we need to pounce on that, we will. I don’t care at this point. I want some tag team gold. So Max and I, we’re going to be doing some strategizing the next couple days.
Recalls first chats with Tony Khan and how he paired him with Max Caster:
So it was a very interesting time … I was fielding an offer from the other company. Max had interest as well. At some point during that time, Tony had found out about it, wanted to talk to us. I went down to Jacksonville during that time period after I actually had said, “Yes.” And he was like, “Hey, I have this idea for you and Max, I want to call you guys The Acclaimed. It’s going to be this big tag team.” Didn’t tell us what it was. We had no idea what it was, but we thought, “If Tony believed in us to bestow this name upon us, he must have something cool in mind.” We trusted him, we went out there and wrestled an hour and a half later against Best Friends, we came back through the curtain. I saw him give a thumbs up and the next day we had contracts. Two years later, we’re fighting for the titles and the biggest pay per view of the year. So it’s been a fun ride.
Hopes he gets to Scissor Mark Henry:
There’s plenty of people, but number one right now is Mark Henry. And that’s simply because he said that he will not scissor The Acclaimed until we win tag team gold. So not only, if we win tag team gold, do we have the prestige of the tag team division, we get to scissor Mark Henry. So it’s like a double goal.