AEW star “Speedball” Mike Bailey spoke with Sports Illustrated on a number of topics, including his debut with the company this past Wednesday on Dynamite.
Bailey said, “My phone has been buzzing nonstop since the match happened with people saying congratulations, but I’m doing my best to respond to every single message and every single tweet and I can’t (laughs). There’s been too many, it’s been impossible to say thank you to everyone, but I want to and I think right now is the perfect chance to do it, right?”
On coming up with his finishing move:
“When I started in PWG, I used just a Shooting Star Press as my finishing move, but there was also Ricochet there, also Matt Sydal and Andrew Everett there, who were all using the Shooting Star Press, so I was like I gotta make mine unique, I gotta find something different, so I added the knees, right. And I didn’t have a name for it, it was just Shooting Star Knee Drop until I got to DDT and that’s when I decided to call it ‘The Ultimate Weapon.’ Final Fantasy 7 is one of my favorite games, I play it so often, but Sephroth who is the main bad guy and ‘The Ultimate Weapon’ is a sword that Cloud, the main character uses and the final cut scene after you beat the last boss. There’s just a little battle but it’s like a one-on-one little cutscene, you basically win automatically, but it’s basically the main character using ‘The Ultimate Weapon’ to deal the final blow to Sephroth, ‘The One Winged Angel’ and that is the image that led me to naming my finish, ‘The Ultimate Weapon.’”
On coming up with something new during his time away and why it took him so long to debut:
“I’ve thought about it a lot, I’ve been practicing that move. I felt I needed something quicker, something more direct, something that requires a less specific setup than ‘The Ultimate Weapon’. And during the whole time I was off, I was in Canada getting my visa renewed between December and March and I spent a lot of time there several hours every week in the IWS dojo, which is a wrestling school in Montreal training and teaching there, and I’ve been working on that kick extremely hard every chance I get for the last three months. And I call it, name reveal right here, ‘Time Adventure.’ Which is a reference to the final episode of what is one of the greatest TV shows of all time, ‘Adventure Time.’”
