Swerve Strickland Details His Favorite Change From WWE To AEW

AEW's Swerve Strickland was a recent guest on Talk Is Jericho where he spoke about what he did after being released by WWE. His first decision was to contact Rocky Romero about future work, but then he got a message from Tony Khan via his cousin.

"I listened to our whole album that night, I went on IG Live and just played the album," he said. "I was just thinking I wanted to hear our music, and the other songs that we had coming out later on. That was November. The first contact I made was with Rocky Romero in New Japan, I was like, 'hey, what can we do?' But then my cousin, Will Washington, he got a message from Tony Khan. He was like, 'when's his 90 day up?'"

His first meeting with Tony Khan is something that worked well for him. Swerve Strickland claimed the AEW President is cool, and they spoke for over an hour, not even about wrestling.

"I met with him at his hotel, I think after February or something like that," he said. "We talked for like an hour and a half, and the last 10 minutes of it was about wrestling. Like, that's how cool we really meshed, we talked a lot about football, I am a huge football fan."

Since joining AEW, Swerve Strickland has been pleased with things. But he did feel like he was being eyed up during his first day in the company, despite the fact he knew most of the roster.

"It's been great, I feel like the first day I was getting eyed up a little bit," he admitted. "Which, okay, cool. I was like, 'I know you, we wrestled three years ago,' but you're supposed to get that feeling. If people are too nice to you, I don't feel like a threat then. I always want to feel like, okay, yeah, we want to work with him but at the same time, like, be careful because he's for real. You want a little bit of that feeling."

Swerve Strickland then spoke about the difference between management in AEW and WWE. For him, the big difference is that he doesn't have to go through as many people to make social media posts. It's something that is important to him overall, as Swerve likes to push projects.

"Just from management itself, just like, it's easier," he said. "I was talking about earlier, there's not a lot of red tape you've got to go through too much. Like, 'oh, we gotta get clearance, we've got to speak with so and so to get that cleared,' I am just asking about a social media post, and they're like, 'oh yeah, but we have to go through this office, and this channel, and then bring it up there, then it has to come down, then it has to get approval.' There's none of that, it's just like, 'talk to that guy right there,' and I am like, 'hey, how's it going man? Can we do that?'

"That right there, because I like to do a lot of media pushing with projects and people that I have coming in, that's a big, important thing for me. Just like, how easy can I get this done and who do I got to talk to? I don't want to talk to the assistant to get a phone call to go through this and leave a message. Who do I get to talk to? If it's too much, I am going to do it myself. Then I'm going to get in trouble and y'all ain't going to like that."

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit Talk Is Jericho with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.