AEW President Tony Khan was a recent guest on Barstool Rasslin to discuss a wide range of topics, including his thoughts on Toni Storm’s debut from two weeks ago, and how well her matchup against The Bunny did in the overnight ratings. Highlights from the interview are below.
On Toni Storm’s debut:
“Storm coming in did really well for us. It’s funny, sometimes people look at the quarter hours, and if you don’t have the minute-by-minute data, which really I don’t think is publicly available, people wouldn’t know this. But every once in a while you’ll get a quarter that has two breaks, and that quarter it’s not fair to judge the quarter unless you’ve seen the minute by minute.”
Says Storm’s debut against The Bunny did great in the demo:
“Toni Storm and The Bunny did great. That was a great rating, over a million people were watching. And in the demo, it was over 500,00, it did great. It was up there with the big segments on the show, it did really well. There’s a ton of interest in her. The first two people to qualify for the Owen were Jamie Hayter and Toni Storm, and we saw them come face to face last night. There was a lot of buzz on that. And there was a lot of people pressuring me to make the match in the tournament. Maybe that was by design, I like to lean into it.”
What Storm told him about her debut:
“She said, this has brought back her love of wrestling already. The way she reacted when she came through the curtain after the match. I don’t know if I have ever seen somebody more relieved to have wrestled a match than Toni Storm. After taking the 90 days off she came back in great shape. She looks great, she is a great person, I love having her in AEW.”
(H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.)
