QT Marshall recently spoke with Bill Apter of SportsKeeda’s “Wrestle Binge” for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, the AEW executive spoke about talking with WWE after parting ways with AEW, as well as why he ultimately decided to re-sign with AEW.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On how he did speak to WWE after parting ways with AEW: “Tony and I have spoken numerous times about this. I’m not gonna go to WWE just to be a producer. I can do that at AEW where I could work one day a week and I’m number whatever in the company in the top ten whereas if I go to WWE, I start at the bottom, I make less money, I’m on the road more. The only perk is that I get to be with my friend Cody (Rhodes), you know what I mean? And just to say that I worked for the WWE, which hey, it’s been my dream since I’m eight years old but it’s not my dream to be a producer for WWE. So, and I did speak to them and we don’t know what could happen. I mean, ideally, I’m back with AEW under just an employee role.”
On AEW offering him creative freedom and good money being why he ultimately re-signed with them: “So, basically I flew down to Jacksonville to talk to Tony (Khan) in December maybe or maybe the first week of January? Something like that and I was just talking to him about stuff and explaining what I wanna do and you know, again, with the Turnbuckle (Championship Wrestling) stuff and I could go on the indies and wrestle all the time and go from Massachusetts on Friday to San Diego on Saturday, back to somewhere else on Sunday. That’s the indies, right? And I could do that and I might do that because that’s kind of the benefit that I have with working with AEW and that’s the biggest thing. There’s freedom. There’s freedom and there’s great pay, which I’ve earned. So it’s like, hey, I did step away and the direction AEW was going in, at that moment, when I was there, when Tony and I had our discussions which would have been in like Oakland, November 10th, that’s when I had spoken to him and let him know that I was gonna be staying home. So it’s not like the end of November, I put out a statement and that was the first anyone heard about it. I had been sitting home for weeks, and Tony and I, we have a very, very different relationship than many people do… He understood where I was coming from in the sense of like, could I go get a job at WWE? I’m sure. I spoke to MLW, I spoke to a bunch of places. I’m sure I could get a job somewhere.”
Check out the complete interview via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to POSTWrestling.com for transcribing the above quotes.