WWE Hall of Famer and AEW broadcaster Jim Ross answered fan questions on a “Q & A” edition of Grilling Jr on AdFreeShows.com.
Ross was asked for his thoughts on Triple H’s performance in WWE:
“I think that he’s doing fine. There’s a reset in the deck and getting his players in positions he wants them to be in, so I think he’s doing a good job. It’s not an easy job, and it’s a thankless job by and large, but he’s getting some free passes because he’s new, and I think he’s the right guy for the job.”
Ross stated in 1996 that he had a plan for a match at Alcatraz featuring The Undertaker and Mankind:
“We kept looking for scenes. We kept looking for settings during that Undertaker-Mankind scenario. We knew the marriage worked. We knew those guys liked working together. So I was just trying to come up with a site that we could utilize that was different. You know, how many times can you give them the boiler room? How many times can you give them Hell in a Cell? You know, they liked that kind of stuff. So I thought well, having a match in Alcatraz where the doors have opened at a certain time and they would be looking for each other and all that stuff, I thought had some intrigue. It would be sort of a unique setting to say the very least. There’s so much red tape, much to my chagrin that it just wasn’t gonna work out.”
On whether he would be interested in becoming AEW’s head of talent relations:
“I’m not really interested to be honest with you. If Tony Khan came to me and said, ‘Can you help me with this talent?’ I work with a lot of talents. You mentioned The Acclaimed earlier. I don’t ever go to TV and don’t have a conversation with The Acclaimed. Wardlow, another one. I have a small list. Darby Allin. There’s a lot of these guys that I talk to at every TV, and that’s one of the reasons that I go to TVs on Wednesday even though I’m not broadcasting Dynamite. I get the opportunity in a controlled environment to some degree to talk to these kids whether it be at catering or backstage or wherever it may be. I don’t have an office there. I don’t have a private locker room there. None of that stuff.”
On if he would ever return to WWE if given the chance:
“Those rhetorical questions are hard to address. I’m a businessman. and I’m very happy to be in the business with the company that I’m doing it with. What would happen if I didn’t have that job and somebody else wanted me to work for them, work with them, or what have you? I take a case by case scenario, but that’s not something I’m looking at doing. I told Tony Kahn this that I’d like to finish my career, my full time career, at AEW. Maybe it’s coming in and doing a pay per view. Maybe it’s coming in at a special like Battle the Belts, or the pay per views. Like I said, it’s something that would be interesting to do. I don’t know. It’s hard to sort of position yourself there because the last thing I want to do is get another full time job. I don’t want to be on the road every week at that stage of my life. I want to fulfill this contract as great as I can and earn my keep, and stay where I’m at until it’s time to move on. We have to be honest about it, realistically. At some point in time, you got to reevaluate. You just have to, and at my age, it’s especially important. I don’t know about another job. Would I want to do another full time job at AEW or WWE or anywhere else? Probably not. Again, if I was 40, or 50, or 60, I would probably reconsider that answer. But I’m not. We have to be realistic about sh*t.”
(h/t to Wrestling News for the transcription)
