AEW commentator Excalibur recently appeared on The Sports Bubble Podcast and discussed several topics. One highlight includes his reflection on the #SpeakingOut Movement:
On the #SpeakingOut Movement:
Excalibur: “It was, to me, absolutely shocking and heartbreaking because PWG, you know, part of the deal is, we have the best wrestling, but then also the best locker room. A big part of it is chemistry, and if there are guys that are absolutely amazing wrestlers but are just—holes in their day-to-day life, those guys don’t get booked on PWG, and so to know that these guys were good locker room guys, but maybe not the best human beings, that was very difficult to kind of come to grips with. And, you know, for my role in PWG, I just go to the show, I do the commentary and then I head home. I’m not really hanging out socially with a lot of guys, and so I didn’t necessarily have that window into it, and so I just knew people from my interactions with them, and who’s gonna tell you, ‘Oh, I’m a serial killer,’ you know, or whatever. And so having that one by one by one just be revealed to me was really distressing, and obviously I’m not the victim here, and there are people that were so brave in coming forward and enduring the slings and arrows of the Twitter and wrestling community and all that. I can’t even imagine that.”
“But just for me personally, I mean, there’s people I’ve known for almost 20 years that, you know, of course he sleeps around or whatever, but I never thought the worst beyond that. There were people that wrestled for us in the past and people that I thought I knew very well, and so there was a lot of reflection on my part of, ‘What did I know, when did I know it, [and] was there something that I was seeing but being willfully ignorant of?” And I think a lot of people that are in the wrestling business went through very similar things, and the more we talked about it, the more we just realized, yeah, these guys were hiding something. And it’s really frustrating for me because these people have no place in our business. I know things have been cleaned up in wrestling from where they were even ten years ago, but definitely 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and you know, this feels like a setback, but hopefully we can use this as a way to weed these people out and keep the positive people in wrestling.”
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