Crowbar On Wanting To Do An AEW Show During Pandemic, How The Match Happened

In an interview with Tommy Dreamer for his House of Hardcore podcast (via Fightful), Crowbar spoke about how his AEW appearance happened and said that he wanted to appear sooner but couldn’t because of the pandemic.

He said: “AEW starts up and as a wrestling fan, it’s not a knock on WWE, but you’re interested in this new thing and want to see what they’re going to do. The whole pandemic, I’m watching Dynamite and Dark and thinking, ‘It would be a lot of fun to go there. It would be great.’ I had wanted to reach out sooner, when they were doing the tapings in Florida, but New Jersey had the two-week quarantine if you left. I’m in health care and if I took off two weeks, it would have killed me financially. I couldn’t afford to go and then come back and lay at my house for two weeks and not work. I wanted to call (AEW) sooner. The pandemic starts to come to an end and my first match back was the ECWA Super 8, which I did 25 years ago. They give me a call, it’s at 3:30 in the afternoon the day of the Super 8. Way back when, if you got a call for a date last minute, you could go and do a solid match and give the people their money’s worth. Now, almost everything is going to go to YouTube or something. You can’t shit the bed. I haven’t had a match in 14 months. I wanted to do this and in the car, we’re talking it through, ‘Ricky Morton is having an issue with travel, can you show up?’ I wanted to do it and it’s on FITE TV or IWTV and I ask myself, ‘Should I do this?’ It sounds cliche, but I thought it was God giving me an opportunity. I had been working the whole pandemic to stay in shape because I wanted to return. I go, ‘If you don’t take this, you’re going to miss out. You’re meant to take this.’ I go and have two matches. From that date, I get a date for JCW in Atlantic City against Rickey Shane Page and we tear it up.“