The latest guest on the AEW Unrestricted podcast was former NXT champion Keith Lee, who spoke in-depth about his in-ring chemistry with WWE’s T-Bar (Dijakovic), and how he would potentially be interested in teaming up with Team Taz member Ricky Starks. Highlights from the interview are below.
Thinks Ricky Starks would make for a good tag team partner:
I’ve never — the only person that I’ve been in a true tag team with is Shane Taylor back in ROH. So I don’t ever really think about the tag team division for myself necessarily. I think that if I was in a tag team, the thing is I don’t know everybody [in AEW] yet but I think I would try and drag Ricky Starks out of Team Taz and use him as a couple of Texas boys and I think we would have like an interesting dichotomy as a team.
On the chemistry he shares with WWE’s T-Bar (Dijakovic):
I would say that I began branching out at around 2015 with my little bit of time in Ring of Honor tagging with my boy Shane Taylor. That bit of traction led to getting the attention of other promotions and kind of got me a very happenstance opportunity actually. It was a young lady that lives in Canada who does some writing and she would just talk me up to certain promotions that I was interested in because she watched a promotion that I worked for in Texas and that led to a match in 2016 and I actually still have the poster for it; that was at Beyond Wrestling. It was my first time-ever hitting the east coast. 2016, you’re talking 11 years in this industry without really venturing more than a couple states away from Texas. That’s like a recipe for disaster if you live in Texas because, you have to get out of Texas if you wanna make it. So I had this match with Dijak [T-BAR]. I don’t care what name he has out there, his name is Donovan. So we have this match and it is bananas. I’m like I have to make a statement and I’m gonna do some things I don’t normally do all in one match. We go in there and I’m leapfrogging and dropkicking a 6’7 man in the mouth and I think there was some point I pressed him and turned it into a standing moonsault. Like stuff I just don’t normally do because I don’t have to and it doesn’t make sense to do all that stuff. I should be flattening people but Dijak is a big fellow and he hits hard. We had never spoken outside of, ‘Hey, how you doing? Nice to see ya’ because he was in ROH and that’s locker room etiquette and then we have this match and it’s an instant bomb. Like instant because we’d never spoke outside of that and this match was nuts. We blew the roof off the place, the card was destroyed because after a match like that and we’re first after intermission, not a lot of energy left for the last couple matches. So, with that came a string and the praise that-that match got, that match became a thing that kind of traveled the nation. It led to that match at PWG and it was a real fortune because the guy was already signed with WWE. But I knew he wanted to work PWG and I’m like, ‘Listen, let’s make a thing out of it and let’s make this your last hoorah on the indies before you do your thing’ and then we went out there and had the craziest match that I’ve probably ever been in and we look back at it now, it’s like Jesus Christ. We did way too much. But, you know, the crowd was in it and for all 320 degrees in that building that it was, brutal, absolutely brutal but somehow, someway, we pushed through and made it and I still had two more matches after that. That match is something that will be special forever regardless of how ridiculous it was and it was ridiculous. But that guy, he’s just one of those guys that if you click with him, you’re going to have a knockdown, drag out, banger of a match every time and it doesn’t matter how often you say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna take it easy.’ Well we take it easy and it’s still an excellent match. The guy’s brilliant and I will always be a fan of his.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)