AEW’s Arn Anderson recently spoke with Riju Dasgupta of Sportskeeda Wrestling and discussed the battle between AEW and WWE, his thoughts on WWE micromanaging talent, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On if he ever sees AEW overtaking WWE similar to WCW with WWE: “I don’t know if that will ever happen again because it was a different time. You had a lot of talent with those two companies who were seasoned, who were veterans, who had been around. (…) Today we have a few veterans in the locker room and mostly young guys and ladies, and it’s hard for them because they don’t have enough tools on their tool belt yet as far as having experience to be able to pull that off. So if it happens down the road, who knows? I don’t think we’ll see that anytime soon.”
On his pick for Male Wrestler of the Year: “I’ve got to go with Bryan Danielson. He was said to be too small, too vanilla, too this, too that, all the naysayers years ago. I knew watching him perform all he had to have was a chance, and man, he wrestled the champion here just a few weeks back and they wrestled for an hour. You know how many people in the world could do that? Maybe five guys, and keep it interesting and keep it intense and keep the story up there, keep the physicality up there so this year he gets my vote.”
On why WWE scripts and micromanagement hurts the talent: “It’s on the talent in AEW to produce who you are, what you are. Show the world what wrestler X or female wrestler X is. The onus is on you more so. With WWE, it’s a very, very, very micromanaged, hands-on, here’s the script, here’s what you go by, here’s what you say, and I think when you have something that micromanaged, especially on promos, you never get to hear who the real person is. You just get someone that’s studied for a test. And now I’m going to recite it to you, and I think that’s harmful to the talent in the long run.”
