Swerve Strickland on When He First Learned Of The New Level’s Contract Situation With WWE, His New Trios Partnership With The New Level In AEW, & His Favorite Female Wrestlers

Black Couch Booking held a recent interview with Swerve Strickland. One of the topics discussed included Strickland’s thoughts about when he first learned of The New Level’s Kofi and Austin Creed’s contract situation with WWE and him coming up with ideas after AEW CEO Tony Khan told him about his upcoming creative direction.

“When I first heard about the news of their contract situation, it was a shock to me. I was like, ‘Really?’ It didn’t feel real. It didn’t feel believable at the time. It just was like, ‘Man, okay.’ I knew it was something that’s a possibility, it was just floating in the clouds at the time. I knew coming back after the main event with me and Ospreay for the Owen, it was like, ‘Okay, I need a momentum shift right here.’ It was a fact that Tony Khan, he knew he was going to place me in trios. That’s where he wanted me. I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’ I have a story with Hangman and Brodido, those were my Owen tournament opponents. So that story just sat there sitting in the cell. You had The Demand just losing the Trios titles to these guys. I was like, ‘If I’m going to go into this, it has to be new. It has to be fresh. It has to be a moment with the guys that hasn’t been here before.’”

Strickland also gave his thoughts about his new Trios partnership with The New Level and how he took some comments from Ricochet into consideration when it came to him thinking about his partners for a new group.

“Like with Ricochet talking about there aren’t too many guys in the locker room that like me, they feel just as much hatred towards me as the rest of the guys and the people that I have these feuds with over the last couple of years. So, it can’t be anybody from the locker room. I have to go through outsourcing to get some new teammates. But it has to be something that you look at it like something you didn’t know you wanted, but now that you see it, it’s like man, how did we not see this? That’s it. [We wanted to] shake the doubt of the people that already [were] going to have negativity towards it like, ‘Man, it’s not Big E.’ Shoutout Big E, I can never replace a Big E. But, we can do something new that moves forward instead of looking backwards. That’s why New Level, song with Ferg and Future on the track, all these things just hit at the right time at the right place with the right people to put a shockwave into the energy of the wrestling world all at one encapsulating time. I was like, that’s the only way I could do something like that. These are the guys to do it with.”

Strickland also gave his thoughts about his choices for his current favorite female wrestlers.

“Athena is my number one. Athena is a dog. She’s one of my favorite matches, she’s probably one of my favorite people I’ve ever wrestled, man or woman. We had a match in REVOLVER, shoutout Sami Callihan for making that match happen. Funny enough, that match was actually supposed to be me and Ruby Riott. It was supposed to be me and Ruby, I think she had to pull out, I forget the reason why. But it ended up being a replacement with Athena and we ended up tearing the house down.

Mercedes number two for sure and Bianca.”

Transcript h/t: Fightful.com 1 & 2