AEW star Shawn Spears recently spoke with WrestleTalk about last year’s Double or Nothing pay per view, where Spears lost a singles matchup to Dustin Rhodes after showcasing some weird character behavior, including wearing trunks that had Tully Blanchard’s face on it. The Pinnacle member explains that this was done in order to set up a character arc for when Blanchard returned to television, as he was unable to appear due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Highlights are below.
How Blanchard couldn’t travel because of the pandemic and Spears transitioned into some goofiness for further character development:
During that time when the pandemic hit Tully couldn’t travel, he couldn’t get anywhere. I’ll pull the curtain back for you guys a bit, we had talks, we were kind of just stagnant, we weren’t doing much. We weren’t on TV a lot of the time as he couldn’t travel, so we said, ‘Okay, why don’t we do something where I go out in the crowd and I start being a little more goofy? I start being a little more comedic and over the top. I start losing focus in terms of, you know, barrelling in on a championship of some sort, to the point where I get horribly embarrassed, to the point where it horribly embarrasses you, T’.
Says Blanchard then berated him and gifted him the black glove so he could regain focus:
Then when he can come back, he cuts this scathing promo on me. He basically breaks me down to a shell of myself of which you all saw. That’s was the first time everybody went, ‘Oh my god, there’s the Tully Blanchard that we’ve watched’. All those pieces all come into play, and that’s when he gifted me the glove… It’s all part of a plan. Everybody looks back on that day and that instance with Tully’s face and they go, ‘Oh this is so dumb, this is so ridiculous’, but it was part of the plan. This is entertainment. This is long-term storytelling. If I didn’t do that, Tully couldn’t have come back and snapped on me and cut that promo.