Every AEW media call with Tony Khan on the week of a pay-per-view starts with a similar disclaimer from the company’s PR reps: Please try to keep the questions about the upcoming show, and no two-part questions. Inevitably, however, there are some queries that kind of, sort of skirt the first part, and ahead of WrestleDream, there were some involving a rumor that’s kind of a doozy: that Khan was looking to or perhaps already had purchased New Japan Pro-Wrestling.
Wild? Yes. Completely born from unreliable internet sources? Naturally. But just plausible enough, especially with the promotion of WrestleDream promising to “end a chapter in wrestling history and begin a new era in AEW” (with Khan narrating the ads himself, no less), that it was worth asking about?
Definitely.
So Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp did just that early in this week’s call. Khan never outright said “no, I’m not buying NJPW” in so many words, which some people have zeroed in on, but he did seem bemused by the rumor and how or why it started.
“I think it’s really good that we created a lot of speculation around WrestleDream, but I’m a little surprised as to how that speculation picked up,” Khan said in response to Sapp. “Specifically, the transactional nature of it, because we have such a great partnership right now, and we’re doing such great things with New Japan Pro-Wrestling. So I was a little … I was a little surprised to see that.”
That wasn’t quite the end of it. Asked later in the call if he would care to debunk the rumor completely by clarifying what he meant by “a new era in AEW,” Khan said he wasn’t going to do that.
“I definitely have no intention of clarifying what I meant by those comments, I want people to order the pay-per-view,” Khan said, laughing. “I think the internet kind of ran away with the speculation based on … I don’t know what, honestly. I’d love for somebody to go back and look who was the first person to say that, and we can track back where the speculation came from. Because certainly, I don’t know if that particular aspect of it is very credible.”
In his four years of running AEW, Khan has proven to be extremely media savvy and a master of not really answering questions while sounding like he is — not unlike the top football or basketball coaches. With that in mind, his answers make it sound like something is going down at WrestleDream, but not AEW buying NJPW. Probably.
It’s definitely intriguing, and that was probably the point of it all from Khan’s perspective. AEW WrestleDream goes down Sunday, Oct. 1 from Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.
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