AEW referee Aubrey Edwards had fun in her first match as an in-ring competitor, but she’s hanging up her boots.
On the June 16 episode of AEW Rampage, Edwards teamed up with Mark Briscoe and Papa Briscoe to defeat Jeff Jarrett, Karen Jarrett, and Jay Lethal. Edwards had been feuding with Karen since AEW Double or Nothing, where the latter blasted the referee with a guitar. In the match, Edwards scored revenge by making Karen tap out.
Speaking with Battle and Eli on the Battleground Podcast, Edwards discussed the storyline leading into her first match with AEW.
“Just to peel back the curtain a little bit, the story itself between me and Jeff Jarrett and his posse had kind of started sort of at our Seattle show back on January 4, where there was some hullabaloo, the ref didn’t see the finish,” Edwards said. “We thought Jay Lethal and Jeff Jarrett had won the tag titles, and then I run in because hey, I’m local, and this is gonna get a big reaction from the crowd. I overturned the match, we restarted it, and the heels end up losing.
“So it’s kind of this thing, and it kind of kept finding ways to weave itself together with everything we were doing, whether I was reffing their matches, or we’d have ref bumps, someone would run in, whatever it might be, and that sort of culminated at Double or Nothing, where I end up getting hit in the head with a guitar. Out of context, this is really fun to explain.”
Edwards continued by describing how having pay-offs that reward the fans is important in wrestling, so they were trying to figure out the way to do that following the guitar shot at AEW Double or Nothing.
“It’s one of those things, with wrestling, it’s really important to have storytelling and long-term payoffs for our fans,” Edwards said. “So it’s one thing to say, yeah, sure, we’re gonna hit a referee with a guitar, and she’s gonna go down. That’s cool in the moment, but where does that go? When you have the traditional heels and babyfaces, if the heels don’t get their comeuppance and the babyfaces don’t end up on top at the end, then you’ve just upset your fans. Why are they getting invested then? This is traditional storytelling when we have three acts we follow. It’s as old as Shakespeare, even older.
“So from that, the moment of Double or Nothing where the guitar shot happened, that’s where we sort of started talking, like okay, what is the next logical step for this? They asked if I was willing to wrestle, and I said, ‘Dude, I can’t even lock up correctly.’ I’m a dancer, and 22 years of ballet didn’t teach me how to do a headlock takeover. Those skills don’t translate, man.”
Edwards then discussed the match and noted that it was fun, but she stated that she was retiring undefeated.
“It just came down to well, how can we really play this up, and how can we have fun with this? It was really cool to get opportunities, like I got to choke Karen out in a promo,” Edwards said. “I had a live promo on Rampage, which was insane. Then it ended up coming down to the match, which was great. It just felt really cool.
“It felt really cool the way we structured everything. I went over with the Figure-Four, but that’s also Jay Lethal’s move, so there’s that little bit of meta-ness that the long-term fans really appreciate because they get it in the moment, like oh, this is a deeper story and that part of wrestling that’s really nice. It’s not just on the surface, who wins and loses? But what are those little details that reward us as viewers watching this product for so long. It was cool, I’m glad it’s over. I’m retiring undefeated. I’m retiring from in-ring competition. Not being able to walk for two days without pain… but yeah, it’s like I never want to do that again.”
Fans can expect to see Edwards officiating some of the matches at AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door on June 25, and WrestleZone will have coverage of the show as it airs.
The full interview is available here:
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