AEW star William Regal recently spoke with the Blackpool Gazette about his new AEW faction, the “Blackpool Combat Club,” and how quickly the group has become one of the promotion’s most popular acts. Regal reveals in his interview that Jon Moxley came up with the group’s name, as well as how quickly their merchandise designs came together. Highlights from the interview are below.
Says Jon Moxley came up with the group’s name:
“I would love to claim it was my idea, but it wasn’t. It was Jox Moxley’s idea. I had just come into the company after being asked to come in by Bryan Danielson because it sounded like a lot of fun. I was initially planning to take a year off, I wasn’t going to do anything because I haven’t done anything other than wrestling for the last 39 years. All of a sudden, I heard Jon’s name was involved which piqued my interest even more and it’s ended up how it’s ended up. Straight away there was a chemistry there because in real life there’s a chemistry there. People know a lot about me and Bryan but they might not know as much about me and Jon but these are stories we can tell over time. Jon came up to me and said he’s got a great idea for a name, because he had come up with different Blackpool things. I told him it’s not about me, it’s about the two of them, I’m just a spare part here and riding on your coattails. But he insisted we called it this.”
Says once the name was chosen they ran with it as there were already designs for t-shirts and other merch:
“Bryan has been to Blackpool quite a lot because he wrestled a lot in England for a lot of years, but Jon hadn’t. But he just likes the sound of it. I didn’t think it would go any further than that conversation but then we get to television last week and he showed me his phone and he’s got these designs for different stuff. I replied ‘oh, are we actually going to do this then? This is a thing?’ We went out that night and I had no idea he was going to say it on TV, but he said it and the next morning there are t-shirts out, so I ran with it. When you get an opportunity, you run with it. So that was how it happened.”