Adam Copeland is shutting down all that Ricky Starks beef talk, and he’s making it sound like fans turned one promo into a whole backstage scandal.
While speaking to SHAK Wrestling, Copeland was asked about the long-running rumor that he and Ricky Starks had backstage heat after their October 14, 2023 AEW Collision promo. The segment had fans talking for years, mostly because both men threw some nasty verbal barbs at each other on live television.
Back then, Copeland called Starks a “vanilla midget version” of The Rock and accused him of copying The Rock’s style. Starks fired right back by saying Copeland’s comments sent him “over the edge,” which many fans took as a clear shot at Copeland’s old WWE name.
Naturally, fans ran with it and started saying the two went off-script or had bad blood. Copeland says that was not the case. Copeland made it clear he did not care about it after the fact, and he doubts Starks did either.
“We got out there. He started, you know, cutting a promo on me, and I was like, well, I’m not in an angle with him, okay? And that was it. It’s just like a thousand promos in the Attitude Era, you know. By the next day, it’s like, okay, now what do we got? Like, I don’t care. I’m sure Ricky doesn’t. I don’t care.”
So there you go. No huge locker room war. No long-running feud. No secret backstage blowup. Just two wrestlers trading shots on live TV and the internet doing what the internet does. The promo definitely sounded personal at the time, especially with Starks sneaking in that “over the edge” line, but Copeland says he treated it like business and moved on the next day.
At this point, it sounds like the Adam Copeland and Ricky Starks drama was more fan theory than reality. Copeland is saying there was no beef, no problem, and no reason to keep dragging the story out.
Do you think fans overreacted to Adam Copeland and Ricky Starks’ AEW Collision promo, or did it really feel like something went wrong? Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.
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