During the post ROH “Supercard of Honor” media scrum, Tony Khan and Mercedes Martinez commented on why Martinez didn’t sign with AEW after the “All Out” 2019 pay-per-view event.
You can check out some highlights from the media scrum below:
Martinez on why she didn’t join AEW after All Out 2019: “It wasn’t so much passing up AEW two years ago, it was more or less, I think they were still learning and I was still figuring out where I was going at that time. It just wasn’t the right time.”
Khan on not signing Martinez at the time: “To be honest, it was a screwy thing. Here’s what happened. She was working with us and obviously I like Mercedes a lot and I had worked in putting a card together for All Out. She was commonly featured in All Out and I was coaching then and we got along really well, but it was before the TV renewal. I went on the Jericho cruise, pre-pandemic, and it was a very eventful cruise and a lot of stuff happened and Booker T was on the cruise and he brought up to me how I missed the boat on Mercedes and I told him, ‘Mercedes is the kind of person I would like to have in AEW.’
“I was using her on a non-contract basis and basically building up to when I had the budget to sign her because, before the TV deal, our revenue stream totally changed. You saw me bring in literally dozens of free agents since then. She absolutely would have been one of them, but she signed with the competition before I got the (TV) contract and it was probably within weeks. We worked on the battle royal together. I thought she was awesome, now I’m going to start signing people, we signed a bunch of big names like Brodie Lee, Matt Hardy, Sting, FTR, and she absolutely would have been a name I would have been interested in. That was a conversation I had with Booker T on the cruise.”
