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The Young Bucks Say If ROH and NJPW Offered Them Dual Contracts, There Would Be No AEW

May 17, 2019 | Posted by Joseph Lee
Young Bucks NJPW ROH Matt Jackson PWF Nick jackson Image Credit: ROH

In an interview with Bleacher Report, Nick and Matt Jackson of the Young Bucks spoke about the creation of AEW and revealed that if they were offered dual contracts from ROH and NJPW, All Elite Wrestling wouldn’t exist. Here are highlights:

Nick Jackson on wanting to hold off on announcing the company: “Matt and I didn’t even want to announce the start of the company until closer to May. We even thought of the idea of announcing the company at Double or Nothing, and Tony was completely against it. He wanted to announce it as soon as possible. Well, we can’t say no to him. As soon as we announced it in January, we were like, ‘We gotta start working and start getting shows ready, gotta find buildings, build a ring.’ Right away, we felt the pressure of getting everything going.”

Matt Jackson on how quick the promotion developed: “Just a couple of months ago, AEW was basically just a conversation between myself, my wife and Tony Khan. I was literally on the phone on my patio bench. We’re talking zero employees, and now we’re still pretty small compared to other wrestling companies. In the beginning, it was a sprint, but once we announced it, it was a lot of working from home in the office. And it was different for us because we’re so conditioned to being on the road every three days. But now that there’s some stuff to talk about and announced, I can tell the pace is starting to get quicker, and it’s like, ‘Man, how are we gonna get all this information out?’ That’s the best thing about having certain people who are hired to do these things now.”

Nick on ROH and NJPW not offering a dual contract: “You know what’s sad? New Japan and ROH could have easily come together and offered us the contracts they wanted, but they just didn’t do it. New Japan never saw the value in Matt and I. They never paid us good. We would have had to work with New Japan for another two decades to even get close to retiring, and the style they demand is backbreaking. Ring of Honor paid us a lot better than New Japan. We could have probably retired there, but we would have to work probably another decade with them. We pitched it to both of them: Why don’t you guys get us a dual contract? And they just didn’t get it done. We would have easily stayed, and there would have never been an All Elite Wrestling if they would have met what we wanted, but it didn’t get done.”

Matt on how they’ll compare to WWE: “At this point, there’s nothing to even judge. We need to have that first show to show people what we are and what this project is. I don’t know if we know 100 percent yet. We won’t until the end of Double or Nothing that night, and we’ll go, ‘OK, that’s how that went and that’s what that felt like.’ For me, as a writer, I am trying to tune out of what everyone else is doing. I don’t want to subconsciously book a similar show to anyone else. I genuinely haven’t watched WWE television in years. I don’t want it to sound and look the way their show feels. This needs to be different for it to succeed.”

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The Young Bucks, Joseph Lee