Swerve Strickland has heard the criticism over just how violent AEW can get, especially after some of the insanity in his rivalry with Hangman Page. His response is pretty simple — wrestling was doing crazy stuff long before AEW showed up.
During an appearance on The Radio Big Mack Show, Swerve was asked whether his feud with Hangman ever crossed the line, considering everything from staple guns to the infamous burning-house angle. Swerve acknowledged that AEW deliberately pushes boundaries, but pointed out that extreme wrestling certainly isn’t something the company invented.
“I feel like AEW is the one place that pushes the boundaries more than any other wrestling promotion on live television, especially in the last decade. I mean, we’ve seen people like—I mean, you go back to ECW, you’ve seen people crucified, right? You’ve seen women involvement in ECW that was very violent and brutal.
“So I think those are ways that we haven’t touched, and I don’t think necessarily it’s necessary for that kind of stuff. But for what 2026 and 2027 is going to be, I will say there’s always another boundary to tick off and go, because I feel like wrestling has already went a lot of different wild ways.”
Where Swerve really has an issue is with veterans, writers and wrestling personalities criticizing what AEW does now while seemingly forgetting what previous generations were putting on television. He specifically brought up Shane McMahon and Jeff Hardy taking ridiculous risks years before Darby Allin started launching himself off cages.
“I feel like there’s a lot of people that try to scrub the picture clean and try to act like that didn’t happen. And I think there’s a lot of writers and people on pages and have these channels and these shows that down-talk, downplay what they did in their era when comparing, like, ‘Look what they’re doing. What about the sponsors? What about the children watching?’
“I’m like, what about you? What y’all did? Like Shane McMahon fell off of 50-foot things. Everybody was falling off of stuff. Jeff Hardy has jumped off of everything possible. But Darby falls off a cage, and it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s going to ruin his career.’ Guys, let’s not rewrite history.”
Swerve then got even more specific. He remembered watching Shane McMahon’s brutal match with Kurt Angle at King of the Ring as a kid and pointed to Bubba Ray Dudley putting Mae Young through tables as another example of just how far wrestling was already going back then.
“I was 10 years old when Shane McMahon got knocked out on King of the Ring with Kurt Angle and then continued to get thrown through glass. Do we not remember that Bubba Ray was powerbombing Mae Young, who was 70 years old, through tables?
“We’re not going to just scrub the history clean like we didn’t grow up watching this, or we got to this evolution where we’re at now because it came from somewhere.”
That ultimately brought Swerve to his biggest point. People can debate whether AEW sometimes goes too far, but he isn’t buying the idea that modern wrestling suddenly became violent because AEW started pushing the envelope.
“Let’s not act like the violence started in AEW. That’s all I’m saying. Y’all had literally rings of fire matches. People got buried. So I just don’t like the revision history or people trying to wipe, like Men in Black flashy things, like we never—people got peed on in segments.
“And you’re worried about a cage drop? But like, ‘We were sophisticated. We had great wrestling. We ran a television show for children.’ No, you didn’t. Women got butt naked in mud. So you can’t claim what AEW does to push boundaries when y’all pushed them 30 years ago.”
Swerve isn’t pretending AEW plays it safe — he openly admits the company keeps looking for another boundary to push. He just doesn’t want wrestling’s past cleaned up whenever somebody decides today’s version has suddenly become too extreme.
Do you agree with Swerve Strickland that critics are overlooking wrestling history when calling out AEW’s violent matches? Let us know what you think in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
