All Elite Wrestling’s Swerve Strickland delivered a powerful and motivational message to the recent wave of wrestling free agents, drawing from his own experiences to advise them on how to navigate the next chapter of their careers. During an interview on the Battleground Podcast, Strickland urged them to seize control of their own time and destiny.
“A lot of those guys have had their gripes of how they’ve been used for the last several years, all the opportunities that they thought they had that they were taken away from. All of them felt like they were short-handed and short-changed in a lot of different ways,” Strickland began, relating to their position. “All the things that you weren’t allowed to do, or the opportunities that were taken away from you, now you have the chance to create it for yourself.”
He continued, stressing that the power is now in their hands. “Now there’s nobody there to tell you no. There’s nobody there to say, ‘Oh, we’ll wait on you, and then we’ll get back to you,’ and then you hear nothing for six months. Like there’s nobody to take your time away… No, the time is now for not later. And it’s not dedicated to somebody else to offer you that time. The time is yours.”
Strickland’s advice centered on reclaiming the time and value that may have been lost. “Take that time and cherish it and understand, like now you get other people to respect your time. Because that’s something like nobody can pay you for. You can’t buy time,” he said. “Take that of all the years, or the months or the moments that were taken away from you, get it back.”
His final point was a challenge to build their own leverage and make the industry come to them. “Don’t wait around for anybody or for anything. And make people come to you. Don’t run for somebody else. Make them come to you and be so good and get your leverage back,” he passionately stated. “Industry, it’s the hardest thing to truly turn into value is to gain that leverage, gain that that want, that need for you.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Battleground podcast with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
