Michael Perry on April 15, 2022
AEW fans were completely confused after this week’s AEW Dynamite ended with the debut of a wrestler most have never heard of. Santam Singh appeared to attack Samoa Joe along with Jay Lethal and Sonjay Dutt after Joe defeated Minoru Suzuki to win the ROH Television Championship. It put a damper on an otherwise excellent show.
Tony Khan appeared on Busted Open Radio, where he talked about the botched debut. Khan said he wishes he could have done things differently. The AEW boss also said turning the lights out before the surprise was somebody else’s idea.
Khan did not name the person responsible, so that person holding the buck on that one will remain nameless. Khan did admit that it is ultimately his decision on how the show goes, but there was a different idea in his head about how Singh’s debut was supposed to go down. In the end, Khan would love to have a re-do on this particular segment.
“I could have done it better. It’s one of those things, I wish I had done it differently because the fans are always going to be right so if the fans don’t like something…sometimes, there is something where you’re trying to get heat, so if you’re in a ‘trying to get heat,’ situation people aren’t always going to love it, but there are things about it that I probably should’ve done differently, now that I see in hindsight. To be honest, it wasn’t my idea to turn the lights out, but I am the ultimate filter and who everything goes through. I put the outline of the show together and when I came in Wednesday, I thought it was the best outline I had ever put together, one of them, at least. It was as much strong wrestling as you can fit into the program and I thought up until that point, the show was excellent. That was the one thing we went off on. People might not have liked it. Satnam is an important person for us, it was important to debut him in a meaningful way and to show that, with Jay Lethal, he’s going to be a force to be reckoned with.
At the same time, turning the lights off for somebody people didn’t recognize, it’s a great point. To be honest, the person who brought up turning the lights off has over 30 years of experience in pro wrestling. When they brought it up to me, I was only looking at the pros and I should have thought about the cons, because that is my job as the person who decides what goes in and who filters out these ideas. We have all these people in the room and somehow, not one person brought up the negative. When we did it, all the negatives were very obvious. I’m not going to say who it was and I don’t need to list all the credentials of all the great people around me in the production meeting, but it was a lot of veteran people. Nobody said that and when it happened, I agreed with the fans completely.”
The negative reaction to Santam Singh’s debut was unsurprising. Fans had no idea who the big man is, and that is not his fault. Ultimately, the blame lies with Tony Khan and the AEW producers who decided to serve up such a baffling finish to an otherwise excellent show.
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H/T Fightful
April 15, 2022 12:48 pm
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