Before CM Punk was debuting at Survivor Series, feuding with Seth Rollins, and getting placed on the shelf by Drew McIntyre at the Royal Rumble, the “Best in the World” was a member of AEW, where he was feuding with Samoa Joe as the focal point of Collision. And who, you may ask, was the “Second City Saint's” final televised match ahead of his now-infamous bout against Joe at All In 2023 at Wembley Stadium? That would be Swerve Strickland, a performer who, funny enough, is also feuding with Joe for the “Real” AEW World Championship.
Discussing what it was like to work alongside the “Best in the World” during his time in AEW in an interview with Bootleg Kev, Strickland celebrated his time performing with Punk, noting that he was very professional in their time working together.
“I was his last TV match. The All-Star tag match on Collision. I had great experiences with him. Didn't interact with him a lot, but I always had positive interactions,” Swerve Strickland told Bootleg Kev via Fightful. “My first day there, I was taking my photos and renders, and he jumped in and photobombed it. I never even spoke to him or had an introduction, but that was his first interaction to me. I was like, ‘This is cool, that's dope.' When I went out and did my contract signing, he was like, ‘How did it go?' ‘It went excellent, thank you.' He's always been a positive influence with me.”
While some performers really didn't like working alongside Punker, with older members of both AEW and WWE using very similar verbiage about working with the “Best in the World,” younger stars really did seem to enjoy working with him, as he truly does have a wealth of knowledge to pass along to performers who wanted to sit at his learning tree. All in all, an interesting development in one of the defining storylines of the 2020s.
Swerve Strickland reveals his wrestling process.
Continuing his promotional tour ahead of AEW's newest Pay-Per-View, Dynasty, Swerve Strickland stopped by Fightful to talk about his professional wrestling career thus far, in addition to everything else he has on the burner for the future.
When asked about 2024 being a “breakout year” for his career, Strickland noted that he's been breaking out for years now and cares more about building on his experience, as opposed to being anointed the next big thing due to one accomplishment or another.
“To me, thinking about that, calling it validation without having it is like me slowing up before I cross the finish line. I need to burst through. I need to run through the line and still add in another twenty years of just a full-on sprint. That's how my work ethic has always been. To even get to here I have to constantly overachieve. I have to exceed expectations. Again, like you said, it was my breakout year. I feel like I've had about seven breakout moments in my career. They were saying that since Lucha Underground, MLW, NXT winning the North American title, ‘Oh, this is his breakout year.' I'm like, ‘Alright, cool.' Then win the tag titles, ‘Oh, this is his breakout year.' ‘Alright, cool.' So it's always going to keep going because the bar is going to constantly be raised, and the expectations is always going to be moved side by side. People have been saying, ‘Cool, he had the tag titles, now what?' That wasn't easy to get. That was pretty hard. Then they're like, ‘Okay, he's never had any singles titles.' I'm like, ‘Okay, that's another expectation I'm going to have to exceed.' Or, ‘We see him here, we don't see him there.' So I'm like, ‘Well, I see myself here. So none of that discussion even matters.' It's just constantly always trying to figure out where do I take this and go with it. Once I harness that and I get that, I finally got it, what do I do with that now?” Swerve Strickland noted. via Fightful.
“Now I gotta take it an invest it again. It's almost like stock markets. No matter how much money you make, you have to take that and reinvest it to go even higher. Too many people cash out early, then they're like, ‘Ah, you could have had this.' That's how I feel like my career is. If I cash out too early, I'm gonna miss out on all this extra stuff that I could be, all that exceeding expectations feels like I'm not going to exceed it, I'm going to meet it and then like, ‘Ah, man, he was here, but he could have been here.' So that's why I'm never like just resting on that kind of stuff. I'm always trying to take my wins, my every type of win, take it, reinvest it, add it to something else and then blow that up bigger. Now I'm taking that same energy and adding it into music and I'm adding it to acting and I'm adding it my podcast. Now I figured out how to make that work on a national scale. Now let's try to use that here and use that here, and bring in someone that knows how to do it over there. Let's bring in someone here that knows how to do that here.”
You know what? You have to give it to Strickland; he really does look at his career through a macro lens, with a sort of long-term goals and foresight to craft viable paths to accomplish them simply unlike many of his peers. Even if Strickland does win the AEW World Championship in 2024, establishing himself as the guy in Tony Khan's company moving forward, it's safe to say he'll have his next step – or six – already planned out for the future.
Follow Us
Subscribe