"He does have a bit of an unusual look to him" - WWE veteran recalls interesting meeting with AEW President Tony Khan
Wrestling legend Dutch Mantell has recalled an interesting conversation he had with AEW president Tony Khan, however, this interaction took place at a WWE event!
Khan has always been known as a lifelong wrestling fan, hence why he was so eager to start All Elite Wrestling in 2019. However, just because he is now in competition with WWE doesn't mean that he hasn't been a fan of his competition in the past.
The AEW president was famously pictured backstage in February 2015 at a WWE house show in Jacksonville, Florida with Titus O'Neil, who in the process was given access to the Jacksonville Jaguars gym to train for the event.
Dutch Mantell was another person who met Tony Khan at a WWE event during his run with the company between 2013 and 2016, which he went into detail about on his "Story Time with Dutch Mantell" podcast.
“We were in Jacksonville and I was with WWE, this is about 2016 and he came up to me, and I will say that when he came up, as nice as he could be, with a lot of respect is what I’m saying. If there’s one thing he respects, he does respect the wrestling business, and if he does something wrong it’s not out of just doing it because he thought it’d be bad, he did it because he thought it would be good. The reason why I remember him because he does have a bit of an unusual look to him, but he told me, and I’m a football fan, he told me that his father owned the Jacksonville Jaguars, and we were in Jacksonville and that explains his presence.” [0:20-1:10]
Dutch also believed that Tony always wanted to start a promotion of his own, and used his backstage pass to see how the inner workings of a major wrestling show play out.
“He just wanted to talk wrestling and I talked to him about 10 minutes, and then when I heard his name starting to be tossed around about AEW, now that would explain why he was there. I do think he had more of a connection with WWE than what everybody knows up to this point, but he was in the back trying to figure out ‘well if I started a company, what would I need?’ So he got a look at how massive that operation is.” [1:11-1:47]
Tony Khan has had a difficult time in AEW as of late due to backstage drama
It's fairly common to find drama in any workplace, however, in the wrestling business it is on another level, with AEW having some of the juiciest gossip of the year coming out of their All Out pay-per-view.
I wanted to wait until ALL info was out before I did anything. Today, I will be LIVE at 330pm with @ChiTownSmark with Off The Script, talking about the AEW All Out Media Scrum, the dark day that it is for AEW and how Tony Khan needs to fucking act like a LEADER. NOW. See ya then https://t.co/od0nwm0a25
Tony Khan sat next to CM Punk during the All Out media scrum, where Punk went on a now famous rant about many aspects of AEW that he couldn't stand, including the company EVP's The Elite, their good friend Hangman Page, and Colt Cabana.
Since that night, Tony Khan has suspended The Elite, among other personnel who were involved in the backstage altercation that followed Punk's rant, while also stripping Punk and The Elite of the titles they had won at the pay-per-view.
Do you think Tony Khan could have done more to stop the drama? Let us know in the comments section down below!
Please credit "Story Time with Dutch Mantell" and give a H/T to Sportskeeda Wrestling when using quotes from this article.