Matt Jackson Praises Top Flight After Last Week’s AEW Dynamite

On last week’s episode of AEW Dynamite, The Young Bucks defeated new tag team Top Flight in the opening match. In an interview with Wrestling Inc, Matt Jackson praised the team and said that Darius and Duante Martin both “killed it” in their first big TV match. Here are highlights:

On how he’s feeling after his injury: “I think we’re just taking precautionary measures. I feel good all things considered. This is probably the best I’ve felt since I got injured whenever it was. I believe I got the MRI late August. Last night man, I felt great. I think we just came off a really tough match. We went 30 minutes. It was brutal. I think that was just the medical team kind of stepping in going, ‘Hey guys, that match was three days ago. Let’s ease into this,’ and sometimes that’s good because they have to protect us from ourselves because if it was my choice, I’d be wrestling 30 minutes every single day [and] having matches like that every day. We’re a big investment to this company, and we have to be able to go out there and perform matches like we did last night. People are counting on us. So I’m appreciative of it. I’m glad people stepped, but I feel wonderful, especially being in there last night with a 19 and 21 year old. I’m 35 now, and I’m still able to do that style, and I feel good doing it. All things considered, even this morning, I’m not even that sore. I’m ready to keep going.”

On the parallels between the Bucks and Top Flight: “You’re right, and Nick made this mention yesterday. It felt like ten years ago back when we were TNA, and we were making our big TV debut against the Motor City Machine Guns, but we swapped positions. And now we were in the Motor City Machine Guns role, and then these guys are the new Young Bucks. So it felt good to kind of relive that in, and they killed it.”

On how their story is unique: “I think that our story is very unique as far as wrestler books go. I don’t think, really, there’s been a wrestler from our era who’s gotten to tell their story. We’ve all heard kind of the stories from the Attitude Era crop of guys, but we haven’t heard from us. We haven’t heard from the indie boom guys, and our story is very unique in that way. The other way that it’s unique is the fact that we never went to the WWE and settled there, and that’s usually where every story ends up. So we took a different path. This is a whole different story about what would happen if some of these guys maybe chose a different path. We even have a chapter in the book called ‘The Road Never Taken’. It’s true because there literally hasn’t been a road ever taken like this, and we’re the first ones. We’re the guinea pigs, and I think that’s why we knew we had to write a book about it because we knew what we are experimenting with, this fork in the road — the question was whether to go to WWE or start this new thing, and I remember thinking, God, this is something really worth writing about. And I’m glad that we did it. Like Nick said, it was a labor of love. It was really hard. We had to hustle through it, but now that it’s finished, I can hold it in my hands. Thank God we did it. I’m so proud of it.”