Tully Blanchard worked inside AEW for years, but he never really felt like he belonged there. The WWE Hall of Famer says his wrestling brain simply didn’t fit with the way AEW wanted to do things.
While speaking to WrestleMagicPod, Blanchard looked back at his time with the company and admitted there was a pretty fundamental disconnect between how he understood professional wrestling and how matches were being put together around him.
“When I was at AEW a few years ago, my mind in the wrestling—I did not mesh. I did not fit in.”
And Blanchard knew exactly why.He came from a wrestling world where the audience decided when it was time to move forward. Blanchard wasn’t interested in simply getting through everything planned for a match. If the crowd wasn’t screaming and hollering yet, he wasn’t moving on. That approach didn’t exactly translate to what he encountered in AEW.
“Because I couldn’t—I couldn’t flow with the way the matches were laid out because I never, I never did things in the ring unless the audience was screaming and hollering. Then I would keep going.”
Blanchard isn’t necessarily blaming AEW for that either. As far as he’s concerned, the entire wrestling business changed around the philosophy he grew up with. His generation used television to get people into buildings. House shows were the business. Now television is the business.
“Today it is a television show. That’s where the money is. They don’t really do house shows like we did, but our business was house shows.”
Blanchard had plenty of time to experience that difference firsthand. He joined AEW in 2019 as Shawn Spears’ manager before eventually becoming aligned with FTR and The Pinnacle. His relationship with FTR ended on television in 2022, and Blanchard later moved into Ring of Honor with Tully Blanchard Enterprises before leaving the company altogether.
There doesn’t appear to be any great mystery about how Blanchard views that run now. AEW had its way of putting together professional wrestling. Tully Blanchard had his. They just didn’t fit.
What do you make of Tully Blanchard admitting he never fit in with AEW’s wrestling style? Do you think his old-school approach could work in the company today? Let us know in the comments below.
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Derek Holloway is a writer at Ringside News specializing in professional wrestling news, rumors, and results. He focuses on delivering reliable coverage across WWE, AEW, and major wrestling promotions.
