Austin Aries on his booking ability and style:
“I really should nominate myself for ‘booker of the year’ cause if you really know all the things I’ve been doing since January and all these different promotions and it’s basically been my device, I’d put my booking up there against almost anybody’s. But when I say that I don’t say that just for me. See that’s the thing, a lot of the guys go ‘I’m the best’ or ‘this guy’s the best.’ To me you’re the best when you can make other people the best and when you raise other people up.”
On being the “belt collector” and taking them all wherever he wrestled:
“Once Impact Wrestling and that platform I came in there and became that champion, this became a whole other thing of really for these promotions, giving them a platform of like, have you ever heard of World Series of Wrestling in Australia? But you see their title on television and all of a sudden you’re gonna ‘I’m gonna check that out.'”
“That’s why I carried them everywhere that’s why I put them on the television that’s why when I make sure when I go and do a deal with MLW that it’s like ‘yeah, I’m coming out with these titles, that’s part of the deal.’ It’s to help these other promotions because that’s where wrestling’s at now we can all help each other. We don’t all have to build the same sand castle, but we don’t have to go around kicking over other people’s sand castles either. I never worry about me being over. I got it. I got it figured out, What can I now use that to sell other people, right?”
Austin Aries On Having Creative Freedom, The Value Of One Cage Match & Today’s Wrestling Landscape
His advice on what Impact Wrestling should do to grow their new brand:
“I just think it’s stay the course. I think the big thing that’s plagued them is there’s been so many different “oh it’s gonna be different now” or “we got this new thing here”, “now this person is in charge”. Just stay the course. They’ve got a good game plan. They’ve got the right guys in the right spots and that’s including the talent and the guys that are leading the locker room and the energy and the tone there and then what we’re trying to do behind the scenes. What we’re trying to do working unilaterally with different promotions, for the benefit of everybody. I think just stay that course. I think time. It’s just time, right? You don’t undo a decade worth of what people think something is and you undo it in 10 months. I tell people that all the time with their health and their wellness and their diet.
“Don’t do any of the things that I’ve think that have hampered that company which is throwing big money at people because of what they’ve done at other places. You might get a couple of those people in the right people, in the right spots but as you said earlier, build your own guys because people enjoy watching the growth and that journey of those guys and get behind those guys and we’ve got a lot of talented men and women there. We’ve have a great open landscape of guys who want to work together and create something and so for me right now I just want to be that rock in the center, the kind of anchor and then allow the opportunity for one of these talents to kind of step up and become the next AJ [Styles], the next [Samoa] Joe, the next Austin Aries.”
On potential future projects:
“And I don’t want to tip my hand too much, and I don’t want to jinx anything, but I’ve got my hands in something tight now with a major television network and on the ground floor and very much apart of the process and we’re in the final stages before we announce anything. But again, if I didn’t have that type of deal, I wouldn’t be able to take this opportunity to maybe create even a crazier landscape then we are already in, to maybe put another promotion on national television. Again, I was just on Ring Of Honor television and Impact television on the same week wrestling for two different titles and two different promotions, like that hasn’t been done and that’s cool because what I see is wrestling fans are excited. Cause they don’t have to be feel like they be divided and choose anymore, they can just like wrestling across the board.”
