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This Wednesday, All Elite Wrestling will hold their second annual Fight For the Fallen, raising money for several Florida-based charities that are assisting in the COVID-19 relief. With Jon Moxley vs. Brian Cage, FTR vs. The Lucha Brothers and Cody vs. Sonny Kiss among the top matches set for the event, AEW President Tony Khan sat down with PWInsider.com on Monday 7/13 to discuss the event, pivoting AEW in the pandemic, creating content in the COVID-19 world and more.
Mike Johnson: First, thanks for sitting down with us. Obviously, this is a big week for AEW. How are you doing and what are your thoughts on Fight for the Fallen event, as you head into another big set of TV tapings in Jacksonville?
Tony Khan: I'm doing very well thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me. Today is actually the one year anniversary of the inaugural Fight for the Fallen. Now we're two days away from the second event. The world has changed a lot in a year. First and foremost, I think we're trying to all address what's happening with COVID, and with Coronavirus affecting everybody in America, and the way of life. I think I would really like to first, if it's okay, plug our charity. I think you were really kind to do it at the beginning, but this year at aewfightforthefallen.com, it's set up where you can put donations in. And last year, Fight for the Fallen we were trying to benefit victims of violent crimes. And this year, obviously, Corona is become the foremost issue in so many of our lives, and the way we have changed our daily routines. And it's affected wrestling, just like every other industry and business and person in America. A year later, so much has changed, but there's a lot of great things to be happy about and thankful for too. But I really appreciate you having me on, because it's just a great opportunity for us to plug these charities. We're trying to raise funds for Florida's First Coast Relief Fund and for Feeding Northeast Florida, which are really, really important things right now with the virus hitting Florida so hard.
Mike Johnson: I mean, obviously, we're going to talk pro wrestling, but nothing's more important than the pandemic that the whole world's been dealing with. AEW, literally, you've been taping out of Daily's Place in Jacksonville and there was a testing station right there in the parking lot. It's not even like AEW... I feel like some companies tried to present this false reality of "You don't have to deal with this while you're watching our product. It doesn't exist," but AEW is the complete opposite. You've been at the forefront of making sure everyone was tested. You couldn't even go into your building without going past testing facilities. A lot of people have really celebrated the fact that AEW has been on top of the ball with the testing for COVID and whatnot, while others are still trying to find their way, and have had some embarrassing situations. So I'd like to talk to you about that first. At what point did you realize this was going to be something that was going to really change the plan for AEW? Because the company was so hot going into March, you had the Blood and Guts match set for Newark. Rochester was obviously close to sold out, if not already sold out. And as we learned, Matt Hardy and Brodie Lee were coming in that night, which would have been massive pops. And the world changed underneath everyone's feet overnight. But it seemed like AEW was faster to pivot to the reality of the world much quicker than other wrestling companies were. I'm wondering why that might have been. Was it the connection to the NFL? Was it your own personal foresight? What was it that allowed AEW to figure out how to transverse this crazy labyrinth we all find ourselves trapped in now?
Tony Khan: Well, it was effecting everything. I mean, it was effecting our way of life for everybody in America. And it was effecting the day-to-day operations of the company. I didn't think you'd be able to present a show without addressing it, because it was going to look very different than every Dynamite people had seen to date. We had been doing the show for close to six months, I think, when the virus first hit. And after six months of consistently doing shows with packed houses and the crowd was often the star of the show, it was really going to be very jarring for people to see without the audience there. I talked about this in other interviews, and I talked about it with you, but not in this kind of on-the-record and audio recording setting. So for everybody, really when I came back from our last show with a big live audience, which was Salt Lake City on March 11th, I went home and watched a lot of other programming to see what people were doing to deal with the circumstances around us. I watched talked shows. I went back and watched Letterman's Hurricane Sandy shows and he was dealing with a really challenging circumstances there with, not only no audience, but he didn't even have people to operate graphics. They really were just using cue cards to do the Top 10 List in front of the desk. So I thought, "Wow, you can really do things in a situation when you're pressed," but that is a very extreme example. Then I watched Colbert from the night before, and he had no audience and he'd tell a joke, it was just hard to tell if it was funny or not, because you're used to having the audience there to... It was just a very different way to watch a talk show. But it was good because it actually opened my eyes to what we were going to be challenged by. And then watched Jimmy Fallon. I have a friend who is a writer for Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show. That was the first time I'd seen a new piece of content from the COVID era. Literally, from the night before, and at that point they were doing the show in the studio still, and they had a small group of writers and the band. To me, it made all the difference in the world. That's when I realized if we just have a small circle of familiar people around the ring, that would be 100 times better than having nobody out there. And seeing his studio at maybe 1%, 2% capacity made all the difference in the world versus being empty. So as far as that aspect of it, the presentation of the show, I got a feel for that pretty quickly. But then I wanted to implement testing as soon as we could. That's where a lot of the stuff really, the science of it, and, as far as doctors making tests available, and testing sites. A lot of this really came to be very quickly. Before we knew it, there was a testing site here in Jacksonville very close, like you said, extremely close proximity across the parking lot from where we're at. And it became possible to do these kinds of tests going into a show. For the last several months, we've been testing everybody who goes into the backstage area, anybody who comes really within, probably, 15, 20 yards of the ring side area would have been very, very, very closely tested and monitored. They'd give you a wristband when you come in, and you'd be quarantined until your test results came in. And then, that applies to anybody who's in the backstage area or the lower bowl area. And so far, it's been a great system for us. I think it's very logical. And you have to have principles and be curious about them. So for us, it's worked really well because we've had people that are going to be honest with us. And if they've been at home and they don't feel well, why take a chance? Don't come here. So, between testing people on site and giving a questionnaire to people in advance before they travel, it's allowed us to keep things safe. And, knock wood, we haven't had that kind of spread here and we've been able to put on shows safely, and I think that's been great for all of us here, obviously, to keep the business going. But it's also been great for our fans who've been really loyal to this pandemic with us.
Mike Johnson: What's it been like trying to find that decision, to pivot from the "we're touring, and we're running major arenas, and we're selling out" mindset to
"all right, we're going to settle down and hunker down at Daily's Place in Jacksonville?" Which, obviously, the Jaguars' organization owns the building, which is huge help for you. But it had to have been....
Tony Khan: Well, the city actually owns the building. The Jaguars' organization leases. We have a long term lease agreement with the city. But the City of Jacksonville actually owns these facilities, but we worked out an arrangement. We have access to them and we are a tenant of these facilities. We have a great relationship with the city and had worked it out where we could do this safely, and got their blessing.
Mike Johnson: OK. So, was it hard to figure out the plan of attack? You had those tapings in Georgia, where it was almost like a 21st century recreation of Continental Wrestling, or Memphis, with the studio style broadcast. And then, even if you look at the WWE broadcast, before the first Dynamite from Jacksonville, how they produced the show was completely different. And then when AEW broadcast that first show the next week, you could see the obvious influence that AEW had, even the way the WWE set up their camera shots and stuff. AEW's been at the forefront of figure this out. How hard was it to figure out and make these decisions about, "All right, we were doing this, but now we've got to really pull back and come up with different ways to further our stories, and create our characters, and move things forward." How hard was that decision-making process for you?
Tony Khan: It was incredibly challenging and, at first, I wasn't sure who was going to be there and who wasn't going to be there, so that was really the first thing I had to figure out, as far as putting stories together was who was going to be out of the show. It was because we really had to pivot, like you said, into some new stories and some new ideas. Blood and Guts match or something that we had for the fans. We were really excited about and it had a sold out arena and our biggest Live Gate ever. And, obviously, we were able to still find a way to do a great five-on-five match and it was very different with the Stadium Stampede than the Blood and Guts would have been, but still a great memorable match. We were able to work for us, but that's a great example of the pivoting you talked about. It's been really fun, honestly. One of the silver linings to this whole thing is I think we've all tried to do things safely, but that doesn't mean you can't try to have fun with it. I appreciate you saying that about the Georgia taping, because I'm really proud of what we did there because we knew that Florida was going to be shutting down. And we had talked to our local municipality and it didn't seem like we had done two shows at Daily's Place. We knew Florida was going to be shutting down. We weren't sure the status of Georgia, but it was very accessible for the same people who were able to get to Florida but we have a lot of people in the Georgia, Florida area. And these shows we did in March and April, the majority of the people were local people from Florida and Georgia. So, it's been really challenging, but it's also been really fun. I told the story on our podcast of Tony Schiavone and Aubrey Edwards. And I've talked to you a little bit about it off the record, but I've never talked to you about it, certainly, not recording, but it was really fun. I was able to gather over the course of the week who was going to be there and who wasn't going to be there. We were very fortunate for that month that we had. The TNT tournament was something we'd been talking about doing, and I had gone to the network for permission to do it. They ended up being really excited about the idea, because it's a great advertisement for the network to have their logo on the belt and have that be shown all over the world. They're proud of the partnership with us, so it ended up being something they were excited about. But, at first, they didn't really understand it, and I had to explain what we're doing and why we wanted to do it, because they never had a TNT belt before. We've done a lot of cool things in this pandemic. It's crazy how long it's been going. It doesn't feel like we'd been doing this for four months, but we're coming up on four months. Like I said, today's the one year anniversary of Fight for the Fallen, and a year ago, at this time, we were still in our early phases. We hadn't even launched Dynamite yet. As you said, we were coming up on a really exciting slate of shows, and we'd been touring, and we had all these exciting things we were going to do in addition to the great crowd we had in Rochester and then in Newark for Blood and Guts, because those shows we weren't able to do. Then the next five shows after that we had a huge month of April. We were going to Milwaukee, St. Louis, Boston, Philadelphia, and Houston for the five shows in April. All five of those shows ended up being the shows you just mentioned. They were a lot of fun, the shows we shot in Georgia, but it wasn't the same as getting those five great wrestling markets we've never been to and we had just done a show in Atlanta a couple months earlier. Or, at that point, I think it was six weeks earlier, we had just been in Atlanta. It was fun going out and seeing the country, and getting to see all of our fans in all these different markets. We had never done a show in the New York market, and Newark was going to be the first time we've really been that close. We had gone to Philly before, and we were going to do Philly again. But we were getting ready to announce that we were going to do another show in New York in the summer, and I was really excited about that. And, hopefully, when we get back to doing live shows, we'll be able to announce that one too. But we were going to make our debut in the city in the summer, and I think it was going to be a big event. And it actually would have been right around now. We'd be coming right up on it.
I'm just grateful for the opportunity we've had. I mean, you've known me a long time and I'm very, very, very, very, very thankful that we're able to do wrestling shows, at all, before the outbreak. And now that the outbreak's happened, I mean, I'm so thankful for the opportunity to still be putting these shows on and being able to come up with fun stories, and being able to entertain people for this thing. It means a lot. Now, other sports are starting to come back, but we were able to stay on the air and get people something to look forward to every week, and haven't shutdown, at all, which I'm really proud of. I know our partner, TNT, is really grateful for it too. Yeah, man, it's been hard. It's really hard because I know that there's a lot of people suffering out there, and there's a lot of people sick, and a lot of people that are hopefully going to get better. I don't take any pleasure in it, really. But, on the other hand, we have to come in and try and make it fun for everybody. That's been nice. It's been something of a distraction, because I know there's a lot of terrible things going on in the world, and we all want to address them. It's nice when we come together. I think we've created an open forum where anybody can talk about whatever that's concerning them. Whether it's the entire company, when we all get on a Zoom call, and the things we say on those calls, I think stay between us, like a family, but we can get the entire company together and talk about whatever's going on in the world. I think technology has made that possible. Even through this pandemic, and everything that's been going on, and through the civil rights movement, we've stayed connected, and I think that's been good for everybody.
Interview continues on Page 2!
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