During a recent appearance on the “Inside the Ropes” podcast, Shawn Spears commented on the Blood and Guts match between The Pinnacle and the Inner Circle, and more. It should be noted that this interview was taped prior to last night’s episode of AEW Dynamite.
On where the match ranks in his career: “Where does it rank? I’ve been very fortunate to be a part of some pretty cool moments in professional wrestling in my career for almost 20 years now so this is right up there with anything else and for a variety of reasons. One, you know, I’m standing across the ring from guys like Chris Jericho, from guys that I grew up kind of watching and, being another Canadian, he kind of set the path for guys like me and many others. So that’s huge.”
On being in a huge wrestling angle: “Also being a part of arguably the hottest angle right now in professional wrestling. So from kind of coming out of nowhere into this big, you know, The Pinnacle versus The Inner Circle, and it’s been as heated as it possibly can get. And now you’re going to stick these ten guys inside of two rings engulfed by a giant massive cage where, you know, the underlining theme is going to be violence. It’s exciting. It’s nerve-wracking. It’s you know, there’s a million things going on. And as time clicks down, I’m watching the clock. Time is ticking down to showtime, those those nerves, those that excitement that, you know, it’s only going to build. It’s only going to build through much like this.”
On how Blood and Guts compares to other Wargames matches: “Yeah, so I’m not even sure and I was thinking about this the other day, I’m not sure how many people nowadays, our general audience nowadays, has even seen some of the original WarGames matches. I don’t know if they’ve gone back that far. I think what they’re then most accustomed to is what they’ve seen in recent times with the two cages and the open cages, and there’s tables and there’s all this, trash cans, and there’s all these extra things coming into play. What we love about what we’re doing in AEW is we are tipping our hat to history. We are going the old school cage. There’s going to be a top on it. There’s not going to be a lot of room for tables, and a lot of room for trashcans and a lot of room for all this. We’re going back to the original style of the original WarGames-type scenario, which is brutally exciting, but it’s also brutally violent.”
On coming out at #10 at the 2017 Royal Rumble: “That moment at 2017 at the Rumble, I’m going to carry that for the rest of my life, not because it was just a cool moment for me to come out in front of 50,000-plus people and have them all, you know, having a great time. It’s because it was about the collective feeling that everybody was in on it, you know what I mean? Like, I haven’t talked about it too much but, as the clock was counting down backstage and I was about to go through the curtain, there was a lot of talent in gorilla at that night at the Royal Rumble and as [the clock ticked] ten, nine… They all started clapping because a lot of them had knew my story and they knew what I’d been through up until that moment. Things like that, I’m going to carry with me forever. Do you know what I mean? So it was just a beautiful moment and a memory that I’m going to hopefully remember when I’m 70.”
