AEW world champion Kenny Omega recently spoke with Yahoo Sports to discuss a number of different topics, including how his goals as a wrestler were accomplished once he won the IWGP Heavyweight title, and how talented the current AEW roster is. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Felt like he accomplished his goals as a wrestler after winning the IWGP Heavyweight championship:
My mission statement has always sort of been “Change the world.” A lot of people ask me what that means or if I’m just saying it because it sounds nice. To be honest, I’ve just always sort of felt that I had accomplished all of my goals in professional wrestling a long time ago. There wasn’t much more for me to do as an active professional wrestler. After winning the IWGP heavyweight championship, what was left for me? I needed something bigger than me, bigger than what I had been doing.
The talent on the AEW roster:
The last thing I wanted to do was to monopolize the upper echelon of AEW and then when it’s my time to step down there’s no one there ready to take the mantle, even though we have the talent that is more than capable to do so. Year one and change, I just really hope that we got to know some of the very talented people we have on our roster. Had we had not done that, I would have thought for sure I would have failed as someone with a vision to show just how great our pro wrestling is.
On losing Brodie Lee:
A lot of times you look for ways to help someone when you’re in a position of power in a wrestling company,” Omega said. “That would equate to giving someone a match, booking, segment. We thought real life had hit us hard with the COVID situation, but as a company I felt that we had made lemonade out of lemons. I don’t want to say that we felt untouchable or invincible, but I had felt that no matter what was thrown our way, we were able to deal with it. To just have a situation where we had someone who became very ill out of nowhere and they didn’t know how to fix it or what they could do, you just feel so powerless.
