AEW star and former multi-time ROH world champion Jay Lethal recently appeared on Busted Open Radio to hype this evening’s Supercard of Honor pay-per-view, and discuss a number of different topics, including his thoughts on Tony Khan purchasing ROH. Highlights from the interview are below.
His thoughts on joining AEW:
“It feels incredible from the first day I got there because I know everybody in the locker room. There’s only a few faces that I’ve never met. Literally the venues and the buildings are huge, so you can go a whole day without seeing all the wrestlers there. But every time I turned a corner from the first day it was, ‘Oh man, I haven’t seen you in a while. Hey, how’s it going? It’s good to have you here.’”
On being in the ROH locker room:
“Being in the Ring of Honor locker room was so cool because it was a smaller locker room. I enjoyed getting to sit down in the locker room once I knew that I’d said hello to everybody. Everyone’s sharing stories and everyone’s happy to see each other. When you go out after the show to eat, everyone’s there because there’s a smaller locker room. But it’s the same loving feeling but just on a grander scale. Like, man, it’s so crazy that when I get there in the morning, by the time I leave, I can still see someone who I hadn’t seen all day, like it’s wild. They know that it wasn’t done on purpose. So like, that’s pretty cool. But I’m loving it at AEW, absolutely loving it.”
Lethal was asked if he was shocked that Tony Khan purchased ROH:
“I think I was more shocked when it was going away only because financially, that was my bread and butter. It was more of a shock to me to find out now you don’t have a job. But it was definitely unbelievable when I heard that Tony bought it. The coolest thing about it to me is throughout all the years of Ring of Honor, it has always been and felt like this underground cult fighting club. If you didn’t know about it, then you weren’t cool, and if you didn’t know about it, then you were just an average wrestling fan. Only the cool, knowledgeable wrestling fans knew about it and they dictated who they thought was the best in the world. That has really carried them throughout all the years which is cool, even though Ring of Honor struggled and tried to fight to become more than just that underground grunge feel promotion. They tried for years to overcome that. Sometimes you know we shouldn’t have rocked the boat. We should have just stuck to that. But now that AEW owns it and Tony Khan owns it, now it’s really more than any time ever has a chance to break out of that underground feel. It has a chance to have more eyes on it. It also has a chance to become a place where stars not only are made and developed but they stay because of the destination, because you can actually make a living there now. So yeah, I’m super excited when I heard that Tony bought it.”
(H/T and transcribed WrestlingNews.Co)
