AEW producer and coach Arn Anderson spoke about Vince McMahon and Cody Rhodes contacting him about AEW on the latest episode of his ARN podcast. Highlights are below.
How Vince McMahon will be perceived in the future:
Well, it depends on what seat you’re looking at. Are you looking at it from a fan seat or you’re looking from a wrestler’s seat? It just depends on your view. Did he revolutionize the business as far as expanding it to having children, and females, and hoards of them as fans, and, you know, all the marketing, the marketing genius that he is? Yes. Did he take the one product that those of us as wrestlers put above everything else, the holy grail? The reason we all want to do this as children is the wrestling part.
Wanting to be known as an elite worker:
The bell-to-bell action he has put on a back burner as being of the least important things, and for a guy like me, once I got into the business, as much as I loved it and figured out, I made the right choice. My goal was not to be the World Heavyweight Champion, my goal was not to be the highest-paid guy in the business. But what I did want to be is I wanted to be one of the best workers in the business.
On Cody contacting him to join AEW:
Cody got a hold of me. I was just going to kind of wander off into personal appearances, and Comic Cons, and have Tony Hunter book me around the world for however long I felt like I wanted to do anything, and then I was just gonna go home and hang out. And he got a hold of me. He says, ‘hey! we got some exciting stuff going on here. I would love for you to be a part of it. I think you can bring a lot to the table. It’s going to be kind of a different concept. You would be with me as my head coach.’ And I had to think about that one for a second. Just going about through history, and the history I have with the family and me always being the antagonist to his brother and his father, and I went, ‘that’s an interesting concept’. I love to apply myself and get creative again. ‘[Let’s] see if we can make this work.
Check out his full comments below. (H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.)