During a recent interview with Sporting News, The Young Bucks’ Nick and Matt Jackson commented on Kenny Omega signing with All Elite Wrestling (AEW) and said they knew that him going to WWE was “never really a possibility.” You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
Nick Jackson on what about AEW sold it for them: “Right off the bat, I would say the freedom, the creative freedom. It was an outlet for us to express the way we feel pro wrestling should be done, the way we think it should be done in 2019 and the future. It was pretty easy from there on out. We were like ‘OK, we can should the world how we feel wrestling should be represented and this is how we feel like it should be.’ The other options were to stay where we were or go to WWE. For me, personally, I feel like this was the easy choice because we’re going to be with all of our friends and we’re having a good time. It feels like it pretty much what we have been doing for the last four or five years but on a bigger scale.”
Matt Jackson on how they’ll make their product stand out: “We’ve talked about this before, but we really want to do slow-burn, long-term storytelling. We don’t want to just give up on stories and we want to have continuity. It sounds crazy in the pro wrasslin’ business because usually we treat fans like wrasslin’ fans. It’s like, no. This is the Netflix, HBO, Showtime watching people who sometimes will binge watch television shows and they don’t like plot holes. They like seeing all of the loose ends tied and that’s one thing that’s important to us. We’ve already shown on 139 episodes of our web series ‘Being the Elite’ — every single segment or bit on our show, there’s a reason for it. There’s a position for it and we pay it off. We just want to reward our viewers for watching our show. If we’re regularly doing this more often, hopefully, if it’s month to month, week to week, whatever it is, we’re hoping that they feel rewarded for continuing to watch our product.”
Matt Jackson on the importance of getting Kenny Omega: “I’ll tell you this right now: Kenny was the missing piece. I talked earlier about how Tony called me originally and got on the phone with him and he told me we need Kenny. We need The Elite. I need the best wrestler in the world and I need the best tag team in the world. That was it. Originally, it started as the three of us and then Cody later came on board. We kind of had to sell him on it because, in wresting, and he’s probably heard a million stories about startups and billionaires investing in wrestling and we all have. We finally, the three of us, got him on board and once he was on board, he was all in and here we are.”
Nick Jackson on if they were ever worried he wouldn’t sign: “Nah, we knew the whole time.”
