Speaking with Renee Paquette on “AEW Close Up,” Swerve Strickland spoke about the AEW locker room and his win over Samoa Joe at the 2024 Dynasty pay-per-view event to win the World Heavyweight Title.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On his AEW World Title win: “What a momentous occasion, what a time, what a venue. What a crowd. After a four-hour insane show, seeing all the action, seeing everything, the locker room, just everybody motivating and pushing each other to just put on another classic pay-per-view for All Elite Wrestling, but just also in the wrestling business itself, to still have that energy for me in the main event against Samoa Joe, and still, we’re not leaving. We got a lot, but we’re still not leaving until we see this finish. That meant a lot to me.”
On a shift in the promotion: “Right now, I think the locker room is just on a whole ‘nother morale level. Everybody knows you can’t half-step at all now. The guy next to you is [Kazuchika] Okada. The guy near to him is PAC, the guy next to him is [Adam] Copeland, the guy next to him is [Powerhouse] Hobbs and Kyle Fletcher, who are hungry. The guy next them is Daniel Garcia. The guy next to them is the Lucha Brothers. The guys next to them is [Will] Ospreay, who can just carve out a classic at the snap of his fingers. The guys next to them are the Mogul Embassy. So the depth is insane, and we haven’t even gotten to the guys that haven’t even really been here for the last several months. We haven’t had a Hangman Page, a MJF, a Keith Lee. We haven’t had a Kenny Omega. There’s a lot of guys. That shift needed to happen to really fill that space and that void while these guys are still recovering and getting through whatever they’re going through. For me to be at the top of that, there’s a lot of pressure. To be, to be the first of anything is a lot of pressure. I can already read the comments and stuff, and I think they’re waiting to see how I respond to that. They want to see me take that bait, but they don’t understand the professionalism and the mind state I’m at at this point. They want to see the cracks, they’re waiting for it. Coming right off of Dynasty, going to Dynamite, it’s like, boom, right into the action. Good, give them no room to speak.”
