Swerve Strickland and world title aspirations among the topics discussed during Keith’s chat.
The February 17th episode of AEW Rampage saw Keith Lee make his return to television after being taken out by his former partner Swerve Strickland and new associates, Trench and Parker Boudreaux.
Lee saved Dustin Rhodes from continuously being beaten down by the trio. Before AEW heads to the Bay Area for their week of shows leading up to Revolution, Lee joined The Ringer’s Masked Man Show.
World title aspirations was one of the subjects discussed during the conversation and Lee expressed that he’d like to become world champion in AEW and feels he can make history in the company as a Black World Champion.
Let’s be honest here, any place or any time an individual goes to a company, it doesn’t have to be sports-related, it doesn’t have to be physical. You go somewhere, most people with goals or ambition, they want to be that number one talent, that number one person, that number one mind, whatever it may be. The end goal is obviously become AEW World Heavyweight Champion and let’s be honest, I’m really good at making history. History with AEW would be a Black World Heavyweight Champion. I’m more than capable of doing that, I’m more than capable of carrying myself in a way that would be befitting and beneficial to a company, not to mention, I’m setting different standards in terms of what’s acceptable in this gross, societal industry of these people trying to tell you what it means to be beautiful or what it means to represent in a way that they deem as useful and that’s what I intend to do.
He dove into his on-screen program with Strickland and touched on some of their conversations. Lee stated that Swerve felt he needed to be the guy so he took ‘randoms unknowns’ and surrounded himself with those ‘randoms’.
So I’m really not certain what could be the catalyst for his change (Lee said about Swerve Strickland’s character shift). I can tell you that my initial thoughts about him, well before AEW, just meeting him is he is absolutely top-tier talent. When it comes to that ring and making a difference and being different, he’s often times very good at those things and one of the reasons I enjoyed tagging with him for so long but, at the end of the day, we’re both solo artists. He seems to like to have ‘company’ if you will, associates and that’s fine. I think that if I had to take a guess, a gander, Swerve is a very pretty individual so there are often times I would see him quote tweet a thing that maybe has something to do with me and my star power and I think that he took umbrage with some of those statements or claims and maybe decided that he needs to be the star, he needs to be the (guy) and in Mogul Affiliates, he can most certainly be that. He took some random unknowns and surrounded himself with them. But great protection because they are massive human beings. I would even venture to say at least one of the two are bigger than me. They’re both taller than me. We start talking about strength, that’s probably another story entirely but we won’t get on that. I think that his personal pursuit of stardom and raising his stock is something that possibly was a catalyst in this and maybe he feels disrespected in some ways in terms of how fans speak about him and we’ve had plenty of conversations where he’s — and he said it openly himself. He keeps receipts and I’ve seen some of the screenshots and I’m like, ‘Dude, you can’t dwell on this. It’s not good for you.’ I don’t pay attention to anything that isn’t an opportunity for me to uplift, inspire somebody or someone doing that for me because that’s what love is, right? Trying to spread some positivity for humans across this planet, and that’s part of my entire existence and what I do is to be that person that can offer some sort of change, some sort of influence, some sort of positivity, something that makes you want to be better than you are. That is what I view myself as the catalyst for that, for other people.
POST Wrestling’s archive of AEW Dynamite and Rampage reviews can be found by clicking those respective highlighted show names.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Masked Man Show with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
