Check out our new interview with the Young Bucks, Matt and Nick Jackson!
The new AEW World Tag Team Champions recently spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard about their new book, YOUNG BUCKS: Killing the Business from Backyards to the Big Leagues, on sale now.
Nick and Matt spoke about the release date finally arriving after two years of hard work to put the final product together. Asked if they could compare it to pre-match jitters before a big match, Nick noted that it’s a new feeling knowing that they put plenty of effort in, with Matt going into detail about just how difficult of a task it was.
Nick: “Man, it’s a different feeling. I’m pretty nervous but I think we did a good job because it took us so long to write. It was a two-year process so we’ve given the book to quite a few of our inspirations like a Mick Foley or a Chris Jericho and our family. And they’ve read it and we got high praise back from them. We got great feedback and they’re telling us that they’re not being biased or anything, and I hope they’re not, but that said it’s a great read so we’re hoping that people enjoy it.”
Matt: “The entire process was grueling because we decided to write the entire thing on our iPhones and it so happened to coincide around the time that we were opening AEW. So our workload was really intense and at times, man this book felt like such a burden to me. I was like, ‘Why did we do this?’ because it was countless, countless hours and if you break down the dollar per minute, god, we probably made like two cents a second or something crazy, like it wasn’t much. But this for us was like a labor of love and we put our heart and soul into it and we wanted it to be accurate, we wanted it to be truthful. We had to fact check, whether that meant going on Google or Cagematch and then not only that, we had to fact check the personal stories so I had to have so many conversations with family members, my mom and dad, and I wanted to get the dates right and the stories right and we just wanted it to be just perfect and we switched off.”
“I would write one chapter, and I would tag Nick in and Nick would do the next and just trying to keep that timeline moving forward without stepping on each other or repeating stories. That was another thing, so it was really difficult to tell the story we wanted to tell and do it accurately. And like Nick said, it took two years and even before then, I remember being in Japan in 2008 and I had journals, you know our Dragon Gate days and that’s stuff that I referenced, I went back to try to get my mindset back in those days so I’m glad I did that. I had a lot of documentation that I went through and we had to blow off the dust on old photo albums and old CD-Roms and find old pictures. Just finding the pictures for a book, I didn’t realize how difficult that was, to get pictures that you have ownership over or to track down old photographers that didn’t even take pictures of wrestling shows anymore, that in itself was almost as difficult as writing the book, was getting all the pictures that would actually work in the book. It really was a labor of love but I’m so happy now that it’s finished and it’s complete and I can hold the book. I’m thankful we did it but at times, like I said I would tell Nick, ‘Was this the biggest mistake of our career, doing a book and opening up a wrestling company at the same time?’”
Noting that they are really the first of their generation of wrestlers that has written a book, Nick added that their new perspective is one reason why people will enjoy hearing their story.
Nick: “Matt actually brought this up a few days ago to me where there hasn’t really been anyone from our like indie scene if you will, or our indie era, I guess you could say, who actually has written a book. Like Chris hero hasn’t written one, El Generico hasn’t, Kevin [Steen] hasn’t, Colt [Cabana] hasn’t, like those crop of guys and it’s probably interesting to hear that generation and our take on how wrestling is and how our upbringing was and that’s why I think people will like this book a lot because it’s so brand new to anyone that has read books and it’s very different from a lot of that because like Matt said earlier, we’re tagging in and out of different chapters. He’ll take one, I’ll take the other and hopefully that doesn’t confuse anyone but I think that makes it interesting as well.”
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Check out our full interview with the Young Bucks at the top of this page; the book is available for purchase now in bookstores and online retailers nationwide.
