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Nigel McGuinness was interviewed by The Daily Star in the UK ahead of next week's AEW All In: London 2024. It's a great interview that includes discussion on Bryan Danielson and whether they will ever wrestle again and ribs pulled on him as a young independent talent. When asked about whether there are better protections for talents when it comes to blood after his own career was rocked after contracting hepatitis B, McGuinness commented:
"Definitely with protections in place. Id be a fool and a liar to say its done less. Certainly in AEW, it’s a common occurrence, intentionally or otherwise. I still feel the same about it if I’m 100% honest. But if I am to look at it honestly, you would have to say I am probably the exception to the rule. To play devils advocate, the people that do advocate using blood in wrestling would say where are the sick? All the other people getting sick from it? The answer is I don’t know. Would it be covered up? I honestly don’t know. All I can tell from my experience was I wish I hadn’t bled. That isn’t to say that bleeding caused it because Hep B is so contagious that you cant get it and never know how. But that being the case, knowing its very contagious, knowing I had Hep B, would you have wanted to wrestle me if I was going to bleed? Of course not. That said, its been a decade now – and this may be controversial, but I cant think of anybody else that I can recall that had the same kind of experience and it possibly points to the fact that I was just very unlucky in that situation.
Though as I said, with the protections, guys get regularly checked now which is good and that was the first thing I said, everybody should get checked. You should know your status. Bleeding with someone is kind of like sleeping with them. You don’t want to take that risk. Certainly from an artistic standpoint, professional wrestling as an art, I do feel like often at times it’s a cheap shortcut to an emotion, to a reaction. Though it is to each their own I guess, there are fans of hardcore wrestling and that style, I never was. For some people they say that’s what did it for them, what got them into the business. It’s a complicated topic, there’s nuance to it, and its hard to condense and confine into a short interview."
The first episode of TNT Overdrive, which features AEW talents on 8/14 garnered 156,000 overnight viewers with a 0.04 in the 18-49 demo. The series features AEW stars telling stories mixed with "extreme" clips.
The Fort Worth Report looked at AEW coming to Texas for All In 2025.
CHUGS vs The HARDEST Elden Ring Boss EVER! (Elden Ring DLC Pt. 2)
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