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Mike Johnson: OK, so Wednesday night, the one match that kinda fascinates me is Fenix against Lance Archer. Lance was hot for a while and then kinda cooled off, I feel like he's found his momentum again. And Fenix is an incredible athlete who can just go and do amazing things with amazing timing. They're both very different in terms of their style in the ring. You guys give a lot of young talent the chance to sink or swim and get real experience on live TV. In this case, it’s talents that have experience but will be tasked with having the opportunity to ascend and hopefully become bigger cornerstones for AEW. So, I wanted to ask you about your decision to make that the main event this week and what you're hoping comes out of these two having that opportunity?
Tony Khan: I think they can have a great wrestling match. Every week you want to pull the biggest rating and feature your biggest stars and these two can be two of the top stars in wrestling. They have everything it takes, I'm really excited about the match. In formatting the show, I budgeted a good amount of time for these guys to go out and have a great match and you never know what's going to happen. The fact that this match is even happening should be surprising since they've been teaming together, they had a great relationship, but it's a great opportunity for the chance to be in the ladder match for the TNT Title and compete on the pay per view. It's a chance for the main event spot for both guys and I believe in Rey Fenix. I think he's been bell to bell in the last year as good as anybody and there's a huge, huge demand for Fenix wrestling on television. He's been featured in a lot of tag matches and now it's a great chance for him as a singles competitor. Fenix is one of our best wrestlers and I think Lance Archer, like you said, he's been hot and I think he's still hot. I think Lance has been consistently one of our top people. He's been in a few TV main events and he's really risen to the occasion. I thought he was tremendous in the street fight with KENTA and Jon Moxley and Kenny Omega and I really thought Lance has a great chance to be one of the faces of this company, one of the faces of this revolution and they're the perfect two guys to compete for a spot in that match. I just think it's a great one on one match and I believe in fresh matches, not just doing the same matches every week on television. That is an exciting main event that you've never seen on Dynamite and I think they can tear the house down and I'm really excited for it.
Mike Johnson: Next week on Dynamite will be Shaq getting in the ring. Talk about how important this is to the Warner Media relationship, whether this is the hard stop for the story, whether there's going to be an ongoing relationship here or maybe Shaq pops in from time to time the way that Mike Tyson has. What do you foresee for Shaq going forward and what are your hopes for his match?
Tony Khan: So I was celebrating the Fulham promotion to the Premier league and I had all kinds of congratulatory messages that day in August. We won this huge match and got promoted back to the Premier league at Wembley and instead of 80,000 fans we played in front of an empty stadium. I heard from a lot of people saying congrats, I heard from Bill Belichick and then I got a Facetime from Shaq and I was like, "Hey it's so good to see you!" I'm getting ready to accept Shaq's congratulations on getting back to the Premier league, and he had no idea. [Mike Laughs.]
He had absolutely no idea, he had just reached out to talk about getting into wrestling. So I was going nuts and he was like "Are you OK?" and I was like "Yes! Yes!" and then I told him why but I don't think he's a huge English football fan. So I'm going crazy and he mentioned he wanted to come in and do some wrestling for me and I was like, that is amazing. What a guy Shaq is, I grew up being such a fan of his, I coached basketball as a kid, one of my idols is Shaq. I loved the Lakers as a kid, I was at the last game Shaq and Kobe ever played together, Game 5 of the 2004 Finals in Detroit. When he said he wanted to come in and wrestle at some point, I was really excited, and then he mentioned Jade would be great too.
So I met Jade and I was blown away by Jade. What a hard working person and Jade just works her ass off and she's a great person, a great mother, a great hard working athlete. Shaq said he and Jade were going to train and they were going to wrestle and I got very excited about this. He actually sat with me at Full Gear, which is one of my favorite shows we've ever done, this year's Full Gear, and I was at Gorilla for a lot of the show, timing the show and Shaq's just sitting behind me over my shoulder just hanging out. It was the coolest feeling, having spent countless hours of my life watching him and him being here is so great. He's a wonderful, wonderful man and I'm really excited to have him and just really grateful he came to help us out. It's TNT and AEW so it's a great thing, the network is really happy but nobody forced him to do it, he's doing it cause he wants to do it and that's what's really cool about it. Shaq is awesome.
Interview continues on Page 4!
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