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When AEW pulled Ricky Starks from his announced GCW bookings, it felt like a major shot from Tony Khan at the independent promotion and one of its most prominent stars, Effy, for publically criticizing the decision to run Ring of Honor Final Battle at the Hammerstein Ballroom.
Petty? Potentially so, but less than a week later, TK seemingly did it again, when he announced that the ROH World Champion, Chris Jericho, would be facing off against none other than Matt Cardona, a GCW Staple, at the show, making two PPV matches at the venue over the matter of roughly a month.
What gives? Did TK book Cardona as a way to show that wrestling is universal or as a way to diminish GCW's draw on their biggest show in years? Frankly, even Effy isn't sure, as he noted on The Ringer Wrestling Show.
“A direct shot or a movement in the right direction? If anyone is to be a central force, I promise you it’s not me. Cardona is very good friends with people on WWE’s side, I mean his wife works there. He’s very good friends with people in AEW. At the end of the day, as a pro wrestler, what Cardona does is sees the opportunity for buzz, sees the opportunity to pick up on something. Okay yes, a direct shot he may be working their Hammerstein show, he’s probably also going to be working out Hammerstein show. It goes to kind of go, hey, I think there’s a bridge here you guys are missing,” Effy explained via Fightful.
“On some hands you go, maybe he’s just doing his own thing to do his own thing, but working with someone like Jericho, for anything that I may disagree with Chris Jericho on, the man knows how to get the buzz. The man knows how to capitalize when juice is moving up.”
Interesting stuff, right? Well, wait, Effy had plenty more to say on the subject, including admitting that he has plenty to learn from Cardona.
Effy wants to learn from Matt Cardona and his AEW issues
So, what can Effy learn from this entire situation? That he needs to stay Effy in public situations, instead of reverting to his shoot personality when fans are listening.
“At the end for the day, I as a wrestler, others as wrestlers, my goal and I hope all of our goals would be to incite interest and get people talking and get people involved. Wrestling, since people figured out that oh maybe sometimes they’re working together, the secondary kayfabe of that has always been the excitement of, what is real and what is not anymore. What is going to be something that is planned or what is something that wasn’t planned and that we’re gonna roll with now. I’m excited to see it, it got me fired up last night,” Effy declared.
“I messaged Matt Cardona, I said he was the funniest man of all time. He’s taught me so much about the way to approach this business and I do see some of my weaknesses in being too honest and too emotional. The Effy character, I believe, is a character of when he comes through the curtain to when he goes back through. Any other time you’re interacting with me, I’ve joked that I’m too lazy to be a fake character when I’m just kind of out in public or even at the merch table. Some of that, I look at Cardona and see this version that is publicly on all the time and I think I should probably be a little more like that. I can’t run from stuff I’ve said, I can’t run from things going on.”
What will come out of this? Only time will tell, but in a wrestling world fueled by drama, this AEW-GCW cold war is heating up in a very interesting way.
