Lio Rush details how he and Mark Henry were able to repair their relationship.
Last year, Mark Henry and Lio Rush got into a back and forth on social media that got to a point where Henry threatened to sue Rush for defamation. Henry took to Busted Open Radio and said he tried to guide Lio but Lio’s ego got in the way of that happening.
The exchanging of messages between Henry and Lio continued and this past May, Rush and Henry were able to patch things up. Rush chatted with Renee Paquette on her Oral Sessions podcast and said he and Henry are cordial now. The repairing of their relationship began at Double Or Nothing 2021 when Rush went to go meet Tony Khan for the first time and Mark Henry was sitting in his office.
Me and Mark Henry, this is so amazing. I’m so glad that you asked this because you’re the first person to ask this. Me and Mark Henry’s relationship is super cordial now. I think it came down to two very strong personalities and two very different eras of wrestling and I think we just kind of agree to disagree and we’re about to be working together now and AEW is such an incredible place to be and it would be foolish of us to carry on any kind of whatever it was because it was pretty random and wild but, I wanna take you back to the first time I was in AEW. The first time I met Tony Khan, I remember I was walking backstage and I was trying to meet Tony Khan in person for the first time and somebody had told me that he was in his office and I’ll never forget, it was like a movie in a scene. I open up the door a little bit and I see Tony Khan and I open up even more and I see Mark Henry, and I’m like, ‘Out of all times, why now?’ But I’m glad that it happened that way because Tony knew about the little issues we had together and he said that we should probably, you know, talk it out which we all agreed and we talked a little bit during that night but then I saw him again the other week and it was me coming down the hotel elevator and I open up the elevator and there’s Mark Henry just solo in the elevator and I’m like, ‘All right, great.’ So we started talking and then later on in the night, we figured that we should take a picture because I thought that-that was just a pretty cool thing in itself that we were even able to have a conversation and I thought it would be cool for everybody to know that we kind of had that conversation and squashed everything so…
Rush is excited about his future in AEW and said after being released from WWE, he didn’t want to sign anywhere else unless he felt wanted. When Tony Khan and Lio spoke, Tony told Lio about the time he saw him at an NXT house show and how Lio stood out to him.
Lio went on to mention that while he was in WWE, he did not see eye-to-eye with Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque and the two would often butt heads over meaningless reasons according to Rush.
I didn’t want to sign anywhere unless I was really wanted. I wanted to feel like I was a valuable asset to the company and he [Tony Khan] reassured me of all of that. He had saw an NXT road loop show within Florida and saw me and said that I stuck out to him more than anybody else on that show, and that meant the world to me. That was pretty cool. Like had said the match that I was in and what I did and everything so I knew that he wasn’t lying and Tony’s just such a great guy. I think that played a huge part in me wanting to be in AEW too because, you know, I didn’t want another boss like Vince [McMahon]. I didn’t want another boss like Hunter. People have different opinions about Hunter but me and Hunter, we’d kind of always butt heads for multiple stupid reasons but I didn’t feel like that with Tony and I felt super connected with him and I felt like he was relatable, I felt like he cared about the same things that the boys in the back cared about it. He felt hungry, he felt driven and passionate and I liked his energy. Like I’m all about energy and like, I just knew it was right.
Recently on AEW Dynamite, Rush offered to help guide Dante Martin. Martin and Rush were featured on-screen together on the most recent Rampage and to get a recap of that segment, click here.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Oral Sessions with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
