The babyface won the war but Shawn Spears wishes he got a bit more out of his feud with Cody Rhodes.
Shawn Spears was a recent guest on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, and “The Chairman” spoke about the feud that gave him the very same moniker. Spears reflected on the now-infamous chair shot to Cody Rhodes, noting how Cody refused to put his hands up.
“Swing for the fences was the term. I said, ‘Okay, put your hands up’ and he goes, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘Buddy, you gotta put your hands up.’ And he says no. I was like, ‘Dammit…’ So again, it’s Cody, I trust him. He trusts me.”
Spears said the chair was supposed to be a gimmicked one, but you still have to watch for the lip of the chair.
“That’s usually the part that catches somebody and in this case, it was. And it was just a fraction off. [Cody will] take the rap himself and I’m swinging, so I take the rap for it and it’s my fault. But I hit him and it was a wonderful reaction and it got the shock value that it did. You hear the term ‘red equals green’ and ‘blood is money’ and all that kind of stuff. I just remember hitting him, listening. And I have a look at Brandi, and we have a little moment there,” Spears said. “I look back at Cody, and that’s when I see the pool [of blood]. And I just went, ‘Ohhh… shit.’ I look at Brandi, and she’s kind of looking at Cody and she looks at me and I go, ‘Sorry… I gotta get out of here.’
“I got to the back and I had tears in my eyes. I was profusely apologizing to [Brandi] because I felt so bad. I love that guy, he’s like a brother. And then I go to check on him and he’s on the table face down and I go, ‘I’m so sorry, [are] you okay?’ He’s like, ‘You are the most unsafe professional wrestler I’ve ever seen in my life.’ He starts just busting my balls. And I’m like, ‘You can’t understand where I’m at right now man. I’m having a hard time.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, I am having a hard time too, getting stitches put in my head.’ And I’m just like, ‘Oh, this guy…’ But that was the night, business-wise, it got a lot of buzz. It set us up for what would happen at All Out,” Spears explained.
Shawn Spears became “The Chairman” after that, but he still wishes AEW capitalized more on the chair shot. Spears knows the company was in a tough position because it was so early in AEW history, but he wishes they could have had more promo time.
“I thought we could have capitalized on it a little bit more,” Spears noted. “I thought when you come into a company like that, starting out — I don’t think we had TV at the time. That was the other thing about that. We had either just gotten it or we were in the works of getting it. I can’t remember the exact time. But a lot of people will say to me, do you think the match with Cody, do you think you should have won coming in? Do you think that would have propelled you? That’s not the match. No, because this match started on the Internet. We did the Road To’s on YouTube and stuff like that. The big blowoff was the match at All Out.
“I’m a big believer in when the good guy and the bad guy are having battles, it’s OK for the heel to win a few battles here and there, as long as the babyface wins the war. That [match] was our babyface winning the war. Because we didn’t have the three months of television time to kind of bounce back and forth. There would have been five times more promos — that’s the part that kind of bugs me the most. I wonder what we could have done verbally against one another because again, he would have forced me to up my game or he would have left me behind. So I was looking forward to that aspect of things, we just didn’t have the luxury of television time.”
Shawn Spears had been away from AEW due to the birth of his son. He made his in-ring return on the April 14 episode of Rampage against Jungle Boy.
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