Lethal looking forward to November 19th.
One year ago this month, Jay Lethal debuted for All Elite Wrestling at their Full Gear pay-per-view. Fast forward to present day and Lethal is going to be in action at Full Gear this coming weekend when he teams with Jeff Jarrett, AEW’s Director of Business Development to take on Darby Allin and Sting.
Kurt Angle welcomed Jay Lethal onto his podcast and Lethal spoke candidly about how excited he is for the bout. Lethal went over his history with Jeff and Sting and also touched on his interactions with Darby Allin and how much he’s enjoyed those.
Well, to say I’m excited about being in AEW is an understatement and I’m getting to on-screen work with my best friend in life, Sonjay Dutt. There’s this adage, it doesn’t feel like work. I get to go there and perform with my best friend. How can I call this work? But I can because it’s an amazing job that I have and you know, from the moment I got to AEW, I had known and met a lot of those people throughout the travels and on the road so when I got there, it felt so welcoming and it felt like home because I had known everybody. There was only a few faces that I hadn’t met and now that I’ve met them, we’re friends too. So being a part of AEW is awesome. I’m really excited because the feedback from when I teamed with Jeff [Jarrett] at the Last Match against [Ric] Flair, everybody was so impressed with Jeff. They were like, ‘He can still go and he’s in great shape’ and this so I’m excited to bring that onto a stage like AEW so more people can see that he can still go and he is a great heel and he still has a lot more to offer and also Jeff’s working behind the scenes with AEW, helping with international markets and some other things that they’re doing which is cool too because AEW is just on this upward trend and the more help we can get, the better. Just so that wrestling as a whole is surviving and doing well. So yeah, I’m excited and I get to wrestle Sting again. Darby [Allin] and Sting. I get to wrestle Darby again, which I’ve had tremendous — I feel like every interaction I’ve had with him has been a homerun for me personally. I don’t know how he feels or everybody else but me personally, walking away, when I feel like I hit a homerun and I love that interaction then sometimes I don’t care what other people think which is, you know, sometimes you gotta do that or you’ll go crazy, right? [Lethal smiled] So I get to work with Sting, alongside Jeff and this is gonna be insane. I got to wrestle with Sting a long time ago. He took a liking to me because he got to work with [Randy] Savage and Flair both and I can pretend to be both of them and I can say things to him that they’ve said in the past and he thinks it’s so funny. He loves it. Oh man, Sting, what a wonderful person. So I get to work with both of these guys on pay-per-view and I can’t believe that years before that, I was playing with their action figures and they were both beating Kurt Angle [Lethal laughed].
Earlier in the conversation, Lethal’s time with TNA/IMPACT was dove into. He credited Samoa Joe for getting him signed.
Lethal had a match against Joe that went longer than it was supposed to. After the bout was over, then-Director of Talent Relations, Terry Taylor, told Jay that Joe gave him too much offense and now he has to sign him.
I came in and wrestled Samoa Joe [for IMPACT Wrestling]. Now here’s the story, I don’t know how true this is but you know, the part that I witnessed was true. Samoa Joe, murdering people on TV, should have wiped the floor with me in two, three minutes. The match went, from what I was told, longer than they wanted it to go. It went like six minutes and I was told, ‘He gave you too much offense…’ Terry Taylor said, ‘He gave you too much offense. Now I have to sign you.’ So I like to credit me getting a job at IMPACT Wrestling from Samoa Joe allowing me to do a little bit more than they wanted me to do. There’s that golden ticket and like you said Kurt [Angle], the skills were there and I had the skills to back myself up, but I wouldn’t have had the chance to use those skills if it wasn’t for lucky breaks like that.
On the 11/9 episode of AEW Dynamite, Lethal picked up a win over Trent Beretta. To get a recap of last week’s Dynamite, check out POST Wrestling’s Rewind-A-Dynamite podcast.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Kurt Angle Show with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
