Tony Khan promotes AEW’s debut at UBS Arena.
UBS Arena in Elmont, New York officially opened on November 19th, 2021. Tonight, the venue is going to be home to a live AEW Dynamite and a taping of Rampage. To promote the show, AEW President Tony Khan spoke to ‘News 12’ and further commented on the competition between AEW and WWE.
Khan said he’s often “minding his business” and then situations come up where competition comes into play. He mentioned that he just wanted to run a show at UBS Arena and then WWE announced their debut at UBS. WWE hosted Monday Night Raw at the venue on November 29th.
Is it possible that when I do talk about competing, I really am standing here minding my own business every single time, all these things you’re talking about? I just came to run a show on Long Island and it’s like hey, you know, they jump in the front of the line, run a show ahead of me, try to beat me in a market. Well how did it work out? You try to compete, like [a] 30-minute window, head-to-head on FOX, FS1 against TNT and I didn’t make that choice for them to extend the broadcast by 30 minutes. I was very surprised to see it. My comments were genuine when I saw it. I’ve been expecting something like that and luckily, we had CM Punk and Ruby Soho and some great stars lined up to wrestle that week or I might have had to change the card and granted, Matt Sydal, CM Punk’s opponent for example, not the biggest star in wrestling. The Bunny is a great wrestler and competed in the TBS Championship tournament. People really mocked them, people said terrible things about Matt Sydal and The Bunny and about CM Punk and Ruby Soho and we stood up for ourselves and had a great show and we won the rating by a good amount, the demo and then I saw ratings getting leaked over the weekend. It wasn’t from us. I wasn’t the one leaking them and then when the important numbers, the ones the network actually looks at came out Monday, we were victorious and somebody tried to get out in front of us for days by leaking stuff. That wasn’t AEW, so all these things you’re talking about, usually, we’re sitting here minding our own business and then it’s like somebody does something, you know, that some person might call very aggressive at worst, and you know, I would say when people make aggressive business moves, you gotta stand up for yourself and what’s amazing is you know that people portray it as like I’m coming out to compete when really, our shows are designed to just be there for the fans. Usually I don’t try to put ‘em on during other wrestling.
As of this writing, here’s the announced lineup for tonight’s Dynamite:
- Bryan Danielson vs. John Silver
- The Young Bucks (Matt & Nick Jackson) (w/ Adam Cole) vs. Rocky Romero & Chuck Taylor (w/ Orange Cassidy)
- Jamie Hayter vs. Riho
- Dynamite Diamond Battle Royal
If the quote in this article is used, please credit News 12 with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
