AEW star Tony Nese recently appeared on the company’s Unrestricted podcast where he spoke on a number of different topics, most notably how he was interested in once again tagging with Ari Daivari.
The former NXT Cruiserweight Champion praised the work that Daivari has done over the years before reflecting on their time together as a team on 205 Live, a brand the duo worked at during their WWE run. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
How he and Daivari were the gatekeepers of 205 Live:
I think it’s just a matter of we [Nese & Ari Daivari] were kind of — we always made a joke, we called ourselves the gatekeepers of 205 [Live] because any time — my thing was literally as soon as I walked in, I’d say, ‘Hey, Tony Nese, nice to meet you. Can’t wait to put you over’ (Nese laughed). So yeah, it’s just we were the guys that came in and we would kind of test those guys out and the cool thing is the company trusted us to the point where they would be like, ‘Hey, what do you think? Is he good?’ So that was a really cool thing so we kind of just came up with this whole thing of we were the gatekeepers.
Says he would love to revisit tagging with Daivari:
A lot of times, it just happens organically in wrestling when you’re always with someone, when you’re always pal’ing around with someone, the company, either they see it or it just happens but you always kind of end up working together all the time. We were always heels together so (it) just worked out. We were always kind of tagging because we were in the ‘Zo Train’ together, we were always doing matches with [Drew] Gulak where it was six-mans, we had trios matches. We were just never an official tag team until later on in 205 and we just kind of made it more official and stuff and we were just having fun. We considered ourselves the veterans of 205 and everything and we were the ones that would take the show and carry it on our backs, even though we would lose in the end but that was always our mentality going into everything and honestly, Ariya Daivari, he’s my absolute best friend in this business. He’s my best friend now. He’s the one guy that I talk to literally every day of the week and stuff like that and we’re always pal’ing around. But it’s a tag team I hope to revisit one day in the future.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)