The latest guest on the AEW Unrestricted podcast was the legendary Lord Steven Regal, who spoke about the conversation he had with Bryan Danielson that convinced him to join AEW, and how he was planning on taking a year off from the business prior to that. Highlights from the interview, including his thoughts on the Danielson/Jon Moxley pairing, can be found below.
Says things in AEW came together very quickly, including his pairing with Moxley and Danielson:
“Very quickly. I was checked out. As you can get older, and you hear all these things when you’re younger about how ‘time flies when you get old,’ it may have only been a couple of months, but once I was no longer needed in my former line of work, I’ve done nothing but do this for a living since I was 16 full-time, apart from a couple of years off with different things that had gone on health-wise and a few injuries, I had done nothing but wrestling. That’s it, I had a great run and I’m going to take maybe a year off except for, I was thinking about this time, I would start looking for the odd things in the UK, just so I could go and see my family and go home for a bit. Then, I get a call from Bryan Danielson. It sounded very exciting, just to go back and be talent, basically. As soon as I walk in the door, everyone seems to be asking me to do other things. ‘You can do this.’ A lot of that, but for the last ten years, I’ve been doing a lot of everything. It’s been nice to just go out and be me. I’m going to do things anyway, I can’t help that. The reason I ended up with the job before is I know Bryan and all these people, is because I will always be at the ring showing people stuff and I got to know a lot of people over the years because people did that for me in Britain. Once they realized I wasn’t going anywhere, I couldn’t have any better wrestlers take me under their wing and teach me and show me and put me into places. I felt that was part of my…if I don’t do that, I’m not leaving this job in the right way.”
Recalls meeting Moxley in FCW back in 2011:
“Bryan called me, sounded interesting, I start watching. All of a sudden, this is two weeks before I turned up, ‘Oh, it’s Bryan and Jon,’ somehow else who, from day one…it’s funny because the first day o the job, at my last job, I went down to Florida when it was FCW and I always watch what’s going on. I had seen Jon and seen him doing the promos. He had just got there and nobody knew who he was. I didn’t get him the gig there, I started doing that right after this day. The first day we turned up, he was sat in the corner, it was a showcase, people had a match and a promo, and whoever was running it at the time said, ‘is there anybody you’d like to see?’ and I said, ‘Can we see Jon Moxley please?’ There was a lot of people like, ‘Who?’ He just sat in the corner in his denim jacket. He slowly walked through the crowd and climbed in the ring and I’m thinking, ‘I hope he’s as good as I’ve seen him be because otherwise I’m gonna look pretty [dumb].’ He started, he had a one-minute promo, and within ten seconds I thought, ‘thank goodness for that, he’s as good as I thought he was.’ In 20 seconds, I’m looking around and everyone in the place was [in awe]. It crushed everybody’s spirits because whatever they had just done, this had done them out the water. I looked at Triple H and he went, ‘hmmm,’ meaning he got goosebumps. The following week, it used to take six months to get on TV by the time you got there, I had been doing commentary. We taped three shows, he was on the first show doing a promo, he was on the second show beating somebody in about two minutes and he was on the third show doing a promo and from then on he was on the main roster. We have that connection and while he was there, we had a lot of things go one, which no need to get into. There’s always been that connection.”
His thoughts on the Danielson and Moxley pairing:
“When I found out it was the two of them, it can’t be any better. This is the day for me to turn up, get myself interjected, and go from there. I’m watching two people that I think the world of. Both very different. Don’t anybody ever think that Jon isn’t an incredible wrestler, it’s not his style, but he knows what he’s doing. He’s great. Technical wrestler gets thrown about, but he knows what he’s doing and is a very good wrestler.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)