Tony Khan Recalls Running AEW Shows During the Pandemic

During a recent interview with Who’s The Champ, AEW President and CEO Tony Khan discussed what it was like to have Sting return to wrestling in AEW, and also what the recently returned Chris Jericho and more mean to the company. Below are some highlights:

Tony Khan on AEW Being Able to Run Shows During the Pandemic and the COVID-19 Lockdown

“I really enjoyed the wrestling we put on. I’ve enjoyed AEW from the very beginning. I think it’s a great wrestling company and AEW is where the best wrestle and that was certainly true in that lockdown pandemic period. AEW put on the best shows, and I really enjoyed it. I was a challenge, and I looked at it as keeping the wrestling going for the fans on TV, but also I created a safe live experience that got a lot of fans out to the show,s and we were able to bring the fans back safely. You know, I looked at the drive-in movie theaters around the country that were the first ones to open up and start showing movies. And I thought, okay, well, I have an outdoor amphitheater in Jacksonville. We’ve got Daily’s Place. This is a great venue for this. And I basically gave every group of family or friends their own section of seats. And then it was like their car at the drive-in movie theater. And it was a great experience.

“And that seating pattern, that kind of checkerboard configuration of seating, ended up being very useful because about a month, a little over a month later, the NFL came back. And the only teams, only two teams in the NFL at the start of 2020 had fans in the stands, the Chiefs and the Jaguars. and the Jaguars. We came back, and we had already been hosting live events with AEW in Jacksonville. So, we had a lot of knowledge and a plan, and we came back and again, week one, we were one of the only two teams in the NFL that put fans in the stands for football. And we did that throughout the season. It worked very well. We have no known COVID transmissions from NFL or AEW coming to the uh events as fans. And I really thought that that was a fantastic way to present shows.”

On Having Wrestlers Stand Around the Ring During the Lockdown Shows

“Also, having a group of wrestlers around the ring, that were very excited, made noise. I got that idea from watching The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show during the lockdown period, the early episodes at the very beginning, before the shows moved to Zoom, when they were still doing them in the studios in March 2020. I saw some of the different talk shows, and I saw The Late Show, and it was like it was completely empty. There was nobody reacting to the jokes, and it was very different. And then I saw The Tonight Show, and it was also different, but it was less jarring to me because they had the staff behind the camera, and they were laughing at the jokes, and it was like listening to somebody in a comedy club.

“It was a different experience than watching somebody in the studio with hundreds of people on the Tonight Show, but there were still enough people there that it was a recognizable form of comedy. And I think we were able to present a recognizable form of wrestling by putting wrestlers around the ring in the early weeks and months, and then very quickly launching a program for fans to come back into the stands as well. So I think we also put on tremendous events in that period,d and it’s why that era of AEW is so highly regarded, and then when we went back on the road, there was so much buzz because people have been watching the AEW shows and enjoying them in the lockdown, and it gave us a great boost for our touring as well.”

Tony Khan presents a new episode of AEW Dynamite later tonight. This week’s show is being held at the Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina. It will air live on TBS starting at 8:00 pm ET. It will also be simulcast on HBO Max.

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Who’s The Champ with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.