AEW star Bobby Fish recently spoke with the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, Fish said he would go to war for Triple H, “I do remember the first time I was at NXT, he gave the post show talk to the group, I remember it was at Full Sail. He laid out some things and the vision and the way that he saw certain things, etc, etc. By the time he was done talking, I don’t know if it was, you know, 20 minutes or 30 minutes, but by the time he was done talking, I just remember thinking to myself, like as a pro wrestling fan, pro wrestling guy, pro wrestler, whatever you want to call it, if you could listen to that speech and not support this guy, like, lose my number. We can’t be friends because his way he saw the whole thing was just awesome. Number one, I’m a fan of the way he sees the business. But two, he really wants the business itself to thrive and to go on to have uncharted success. Then after being there with him for the better part of three or four years or whatever, and being the Undisputed Era, going through the WarGames and all that stuff, I would go to war for that man, hands down. If he tells me, ‘Listen, I need you to run through that wall’, I’m gonna try. If he tells me he thinks I can do it, like, alright. I will try.”
According to Fish, not every wrestler should perform every move, he said, “There’s too many people that because they can do everything, they feel like, well, then I should do everything. It’s like, no, that’s where it gets boring because let’s say you got 10 Guys, and all 10 of them are capable of doing everything, well, there’s a portion of what you’re capable of doing that you can only really pull off because it’s pro wrestling. If it were competitive, some of that, that you don’t do quite as well, you wouldn’t be doing. But yet, because it’s pro wrestling, we can get away with it. Just because you can get away with it doesn’t mean you should get away with it. I think that that’s where pro wrestling has kind of gotten off track. The way that styles kind of meshed together are what make it interesting. I think we’ve lost a little bit of that. What makes a match with Bam Bam Bigelow, that’s the only name coming to mind, and Ricochet interesting would be the fact that they’re so different. But because Bam Bam can do a moonsault in a match with Ricochet, he probably shouldn’t do it, because he isn’t going to look the way Ricochets does. So I think in that regard, everybody could use a little bit of like, stay in your lane, as*hole. That’s what makes it interesting.”
Fish also discussed wrestlers are increasingly incorporating “MMA” moves into their matches, “If you’re gonna do the MMA thing, like, if that’s the direction we should go in, like, well fu*king train at least. If that’s not what you do, and you’re not willing to put that time in to go train Muay Thai, don’t throw leg kicks. If you’re not willing to put the time in to train jiu jitsu, don’t do heel hooks. Don’t fake the funk just because you can fake the funk. I think it hurts the sport.”
He also gave more thoughts on why wrestling is looking fake, “I can do a moonsault and I can do a few things, and I’m nobody special for that. But if I’m in a match with Ricochet, why would I do a moonsault? He’s gonna do two rotations, maybe three. Even if he only does the same exact move that I did, he’s gonna have a certain glide to it that’s just not going to be there when I do it. So in the same regard, why would you come and do a match with me, now if you’ve trained it, great. Let’s do it. Bryan Danielson and myself, we worked and put it on each other’s legs. Why? Because we both train Muay Thai, so it looked a certain way. But if you don’t train Muay Thai and you’re in a match with me, why are you going to trade leg kicks with me? Because if I sell your leg kicks, and they don’t look like mine do, and they’re not going to, then we’re pretty much telling everyone, ‘Hey, this is bullsh*t, but still give us your money.’”
“If that’s where your interest is, I got no problem with you mixing it into your pro wrestling, but put the reps in because if you go out and do it on TV, as the second or third time you’ve done it ever, it’s gonna look like that. In the same regard, if you’ve put 10,000 reps in, and you go and you do it on TV, it’s gonna look like this. They’ll remain nameless, but there are those in pro wrestling who have gone out, and if they were putting the reps in, I don’t know where the fu*k they were putting them in, but they still to this day will throw head kicks and different things and it’s like, I can’t even call that martial arts. I don’t know what to call it. But my stepdaughter who’s nine, and has never trained a day in her life, would have a better head kick than some of these people.”
Regarding wrestlers who slap their legs after a kick, Fish said, “It makes me sick. It really wants to make me get sick, especially when people do it on a leg kick, because if you know anything about leg kicks, the ones that hurt the worst are the ones that don’t make noise. Those are the ones when the shin has really just dug almost down to the bone.”
“If you understood anything about it, if you even took five minutes to understand the actual art, you would know that slapping your leg defeats the purpose of having it in your arsenal. If it makes that loud of a noise, it’s not what you’re looking for.”
You can listen to the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
