During today’s Busted Open Radio, Tony Khan was on to promote tonight’s AEW Dynamite. He also addressed critics, namely Eric Bischoff, who say that there is not enough story to build to some matches.
Khan said the following:
“There’s a lot of really interesting stories happening in AEW. There’s this fascinating thing happening. I’ve noticed that things have changed a lot in the perception of how a wrestling card is built over the years. Now there’s this perception, I think because this is the way people have seen it done for most of the last 20 years, to some extent it has become an industry standard if only for lack of competition. There’s this perception that every match on every show should have a long storyline built on why it takes place. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the case for every single match. I think there’s absolutely a lot of story in most of the matches on this show and most matches on a lot of our shows. But sometimes you can see something that’s the start of the new issue.”
Khan continued, “Frankly, the person who I think has been the most incendiary and contradictory and hypocritical on this entire point is Eric Bischoff. If you watch Nitros, especially the good Nitros from 95 to 98, a lot of the quality of the show was seeing Lucha matches and things that you didn’t expect and there was a certain exquisite randomness to the lineup of the card. You turn the show on and it would be Rick Martel against Perry Saturn, that’s pretty cool. Or hey, Randy Savage against Bobby Eaton, okay. And various Lucha matches that didn’t necessarily have build-up but were fun matches. They weren’t the big story matches. Sure, there were a lot of stories happening in WCW but probably less than half the matches on Nitro had a story going into them. And that was fine. It was the industry standard show. Then it really tried to copy its competition and put lots of story where every single match had to have two guys having a fight over a cup of coffee in catering. That just doesn’t need to be the case. Sometimes it can be as simple as a challenge or two people fighting to be the best. The majority of the time or certainly a large percentage of the time you should have a lot of story built into a match. You know, this perception that you can’t just have two people come in and fight, it could be the start of something. It could lead to something with two completely different people, who knows. But there’s a lot of different ways to skin a cat. In this case, to see the person who probably put more cold matches on TV, and did it successfully and did it well, say that it’s an abomination to do it, it’s pretty contradictory. So I found it really ironic when I hear Eric Bischoff talk about why is this match happening. Why did 60 percent of the matches on Nitro happen honestly, that was when Nitro was a better show and they tried to change it to something else.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Busted Open Radio with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. Busted Open Radio can be heard on SiriusXM’s Fight Nation (Channel 156), Monday through Saturday from 9 am to Noon eastern.
