Austin Aries shares his philosophy on working the marks in the crowd — and the ones in the locker room.
During his appearance on The Undisputed Podcast with Bobby Fish, Austin Aries spoke about wrestlers and fans ruining the “mystique” of wrestling and how he combats that.
“One thing I’ve always done after matches, if I want to go talk to my opponent and say we’re in a bar after the show and I know there’s a bunch of fans around, I’ll go up to the guy. If I’m leaving for the night, I want to say goodbye, and I’ll just start doing my finger in his face. ‘Hey, man, thanks a lot for the match tonight. I appreciate it.’ Because anybody not within earshot thinks I’m over there giving this guy the business, think they’re still an issue.
“This is what I did with the John Morrison match at Bound for Glory. Which basically, I worked the entire locker room because that’s where the marks are nowadays, because they’re feeding everything to the dirt sheets so they get an extra star on their match. So, I knew we had all these people believing that me and John had legitimate heat. They’re really upset about my tweet. And so that whole night that when we were calling the match for Bound for Glory, I would sit there and I got my arms up and I’m doing this and I’m walking away and I’m like being all animated and doing all this sh*t to him while we’re talking it out. Because I know that all these other kids that are sitting 30 yards from us are going, ‘Oh shit, man, those guys really got a problem over there, right?’ And it’s like, because that’s what we have to do nowadays, to work the marks, you got to work the marks in the locker room first because then they go and spill that sh*t to the dirt sheets,” Aries said. “That’s why they all think it’s real, right?”
Aries explained that fans saw what he wanted them to see because he starts working people the second he leaves his house.
“Once I put that costume on, my show clothes as I call them, and I walk out the door for the airport, I am now assuming a certain part of that persona. I am now going to work. And that’s the way I was taught and that’s the way I believe it should be,” Aries explained. “You don’t start trying to get heat when you walk out the curtain. You get heat when you’re sitting at the gimmick table before the show. You get heat the moment you see some fans in line before the show. That’s just the way that I was brought in the business and the way I’ve always thought about it.”
Austin Aries went on to say that he respects the “magic” of the business and compared it to a magician sawing a woman in half. He said no one actually believes a woman is being sawed in half, but the magician isn’t out there saying it’s fake, either.
“The show is in the illusion of me not being able to figure out what’s real, what’s not, and how you actually do the magic. It’s why I would never let my students or I hate when guys are posting clips of them training. ‘Oh, here’s me training these spots at my camp.’ It’s like, stop showing them how you do the magic. I don’t give a sh*t. Who are you doing this for? I don’t need to watch you do some tackle drop-down spot poorly, I might add, because you can’t even lock up, and showing everyone like how the magic is done. And again, that’s just me being an old man yelling at the clouds because I grew up watching wrestling a certain way. It’s obviously shifted completely in a different direction in the last 20 years.”
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