Former WWE manager Dutch Mantel claimed on his podcast that Tony Khan reached out to him several months ago. The subject came up after Mantel was asked if AEW or WWE asked him to be on the payroll to be a remote booker or advisor:
“Tony Khan called me one time about six months ago and wanted to know how I was doing. I told him fine. I think he was kind of fishing around if I wanted to take any kind of role with AEW. Physically, I couldn’t do it because I have mobility problems, but virtually I could, but virtually only works and that position only works if people listen to you.”
Thoughts on Booker T’s comments that he lost his motivation after two weeks of being in TNA and being ashamed of some of the things he did in his time there:
“That’s his opinion and I kind of agree with it. I respect his ability. I respect his talent, but I think it took more than two weeks, maybe a month.”
“Booker T came in there, and he was almost, he thought, I think, in my opinion, he was bigger than the brand. He had been in WWE and he had accomplished all these things. When he got to TNA, he only got there because the WWE finished him up. They gave him his notice and said we’re not going to renew your contract, so he was looking for another place to work and he found it in TNA. It wasn’t hard for him to find it because he was a big name.”
“He came in and, like he said, he wanted to do things his way because he didn’t have, I don’t think, the faith in TNA creative that he should have had, I think just out of respect, and I don’t even doubt him for that. But he, Booker, was very difficult at times to work with because you would lay out where you wanted this to go and he would immediately try to change it because he didn’t like it. The reason he didn’t like, and it took me months to kind of figure this out, he wanted to know how it would make him look not only with his present employer, TNA and the fans, that was one lens he was looking at it through, which is most of what everybody else was looking through at the time, the lens they were in now, but he looked at it through another lens, the WWE lens, and how that would make him look to them because he knew Vince (McMahon) watched the show and he didn’t want to do anything that didn’t portray him in in the best light, not the strongest light, but the best light, and I can understand that.”
“I remember one time, we had him doing something and his agent laid out what he wanted to do. Well, he didn’t like it. So he ran to Vince Russo and said, ‘I don’t think I should be doing this.’ Vince would send him to me. I wasn’t the one who booked it in the first place. He came over and told me, ‘Is this what we really wanted and can I change it?’ I would send him to Jeff. Jeff would send him back to Vince, which in turn, Vince would send him back to me for me to tell him the same thing I had told him previously, ‘Go see Jeff.’ Jeff would send him back to Vince, but he wouldn’t go to Vince. He would go to Dixie (Carter), and then Dixie would go to Vince, and Vince would say, ‘Go to Dutch’, and finally Dixie would come to me and ‘Do you think we could change it?’ I said, ‘Look, tell him to do whatever he wants to do as long as he stays in the parameters of where we need him to be. Let him do it.’ So he would do that.”
“I remember one time he was doing commentary and he’s pretty good on commentary. I think this is one of the things he may have been ashamed of. I was ashamed of it really because he started talking in an English accent. I think you told me earlier that he did that in WWE when he was King of the Ring. I would like to see artificial intelligence copy Booker’s accent and his voice. He got to talk in a royal accent, let me say that, and I didn’t know why. So I asked Vince, ‘Why is he talking in a British, English accent?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I asked Jeff, ‘I don’t know.’ Nobody knew and nobody corrected it, so he kept talking in that voice for whatever reason for months.”
“Anyway, what I’m saying I don’t think Booker is totally wrong, but I know and some other people came in to look at what they were doing not only through the TNA lens, but through the WWE Vince lens, and they didn’t like it because they knew Vince and they knew Vince would be thinking, ‘That makes us look bad. Not you look bad, but it makes us look bad’, and they know how Vince holds grudges, so they wouldn’t do it.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Story Time with Dutch Mantel with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
