Ricky Starks is an “Absolute” promo champion.
The former FTW Champion and number one contender to the AEW World Championship spoke about his verbal style during a recent interview with ComicBook.com to promote next week’s AEW Winter Is Coming special event, where he challenges MJF for the title.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he talks at length about the “go-home” promo segment between himself and Maxwell Jacob Friedman from this past Wednesday night’s show.
On the creative promo process and how he wrote his entire promo for MJF showdown: “I think you’ll hear a lot of wrestlers say, ‘Oh, I didn’t think of it. I didn’t plan it out, I didn’t write it out.’ And Cody [Rhodes] makes the same joke, but that’s bull. Even the best promos had to have some type of structure to them. And I am somewhat in the same way, admittedly. I’m not one to really pull back the curtain on anything here, but yesterday, earlier in the day, I had wrote out this whole thing, and in my head memorized it and did all this, and stressed myself out, and then had a match to do. Anything could have gone wrong where I just forget it in the match.”
On being like Jon Moxley in the way he throws things out in the moment: “I remember Max cutting that promo and saying these comments, and in that moment I was like, ‘I’ll just wing it. I’ll just wing it. I know where I want to go and what I want to get to, and I’ll just fill in the blanks.’ So what you saw out there was me winging it. That’s how I operate. Yes, I can come up with some lines and think about it, but for the most part, whatever I feel, I just say, and it comes off in that moment.”
On the fan reaction to his promo: “I’m not a stranger to this type of reception to a promo I’ve done. Earlier in the year, after I lost the title to Hook, I had a similar promo. The common theme between all that is it’s just me really speaking from the heart in every single instance.”
Check out the complete Ricky Starks interview by visiting ComicBook.com.
