During a recent appearance on the “Barstool Rasslin” podcast, AEW President Tony Khan commented on Toni Storm’s AEW debut, what Storm told him after she returned to the backstage area following her match with The Bunny, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On FTR’s recent run of success: “Well, I think it’s because they’re two of the best pro wrestlers on the planet. They had some great matches here just in the past year, they’ve had some classics. I think their match at Grand Slam with Sting and Darby was excellent, and it had been building up to them having a match with The Young Bucks. 18 months ago they wrestled The Young Bucks at Full Gear, 2020, and so much had changed in a year-and-a-half in the world of wrestling.
“I think it was unimaginable that the Ring Of Honor Tag Team Championship would be defended along with the AAA Tag Team Championship on Dynamite. And that really, FTR would have changed their tune a bit. They’ve really started to rely on their wrestling ability, and not on cheating and Tully Blanchard.”
On Toni Storm making her AEW debut: “Storm coming in did really well for us. It’s funny, sometimes people look at the quarter hours, and if you don’t have the minute-by-minute data, which really I don’t think is publicly available, people wouldn’t know this. But every once in a while you’ll get a quarter that has two breaks, and that quarter it’s not fair to judge the quarter unless you’ve seen the minute by minute.
“Toni Storm and The Bunny did great. That was a great rating, over a million people were watching. And in the demo, it was over 500,000, it did great. It was up there with the big segments on the show, it did really well. There’s a ton of interest in her. The first two people to qualify for the Owen were Jamie Hayter and Toni Storm, and we saw them come face to face last night. There was a lot of buzz on that. And there was a lot of people pressuring me to make the match in the tournament. Maybe that was by design, I like to lean into it.”
On what Storm told him about her debut: “She said, this has brought back her love of wrestling already. The way she reacted when she came through the curtain after the match. I don’t know if I have ever seen somebody more relieved to have wrestled a match than Toni Storm. After taking the 90 days off she came back in great shape. She looks great, she is a great person, I love having her in AEW.”
(h/t – Wrestling Inc)
