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When Keith Lee and Swerve Strickland teamed up to go to bat against the former team of Powerhouse Hobbs and Ricky Starks, then known as Team Taz, it always felt like a weird fit. No, not because they were both former WWE guys, or even because it felt like Tony Khan had no real plans for the duo as singles performers, but because Lee is the perennial babyface who believes in order and doing the right thing, and Strickland did his best work in NXT as a heel with Hit Row.
Can heel-face tag teams work? Sure, odd couple tag teams have been a thing forever, and there's a long and treasured history of a good guy working with a bad guy only for the duo to eventually turn on each other, but this particular pairing almost immediately had cracks the shown threw the facade, with Strickland eliminating Lee from the Number 2 Contender Casino Battle Royale in Missouri back in June. Though the duo didn't immediately break up and actually took the AEW Tag Team Championships off of the Young Bucks a month later at Fyter Fest, their union never felt immutable.
If anything, Swerve in our Glory has proven to be too mutable, though not for the reason many fans may have assumed.
After losing their belts to The Acclaimed at Grand Slam in a controversial finish that saw Billy Gunn tip the scales in his team's favor, Swerve in our Glory haven't worked a match together since, with Lee congratulating Max Caster and Anthony Bowens for their win while Strickland has made it his personal mission to destroy the trio once and for all. He interrupted the trio on the first-ever celebration of National Scissoring Day, which feels like a borderline crime, asserting that rock beats scissors while holding a giant stone in his hand while asking Gunn for a singles match at AEW's Toronto debut.
“And don't you dare think about putting those fingers up in my face,” Strickland told Gunn on Dynamite. “Because if you do that, you're never gonna use that hand again. Because we all know rock beats scissors every day.”
With The Acclaimed primed for a long and fruitful babyface run as the AEW Tag Team Champions, it sure looks like they have their stone-cold heel foe lined up in Strickland.
Former #AEW World Tag Team Champion @swerveconfident challenges @RealBillyGunn here on #AEWDynamite’s 3-Year Anniversary Show LIVE on @TBSNetwork! pic.twitter.com/FX71I4nFIM
— All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) October 6, 2022
Swerve Strickland lauds Tony Khan's efforts in AEW.
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Speaking with Kaz, Lowkey, and Rosy on the Say Less podcast, Swerve Strickland discussed the struggles that AEW has been put through since his arrival n the company and why struggles aren't always a bad thing, as transcribed by Fightful.
“If he is in over his head, if he is, this is speculation on my part, if he is in over his head, good, because he has to be challenged that way,” Swerve said. “He needs to. He knows he needs to. You don't do a million-dollar gate on a Wednesday night at Arthur Ashe without challenges. You think that's easy? No. He should be going after these challenges. He should be dealing with locker room morale and ‘this person wants this, this person wants this' and ‘there's friction and things like that.' He has to go through that. If he doesn't, how do we grow? We have to go through growing pains. I don't understand how people think that's just an AEW thing. Vince McMahon has fought people. We've seen these things. That was 20 years in. They almost went bankrupt like how many times? AEW has to face these challenges because they have to grow and evolve. You don't grow and evolve without building Kevlar.”
Strickland then turned his attention to the performers in the ring and gave some very interesting insight into the inner workings of the industry without mentioning any names.
“We have to take responsibility as performers, in a way as well, because if we put the same reason of why we can't be successful in one place, I'm not talking about anybody specifically, just general, if we put the same responsibility on the promotion and the ‘brass ring is not allowing me to breakthrough' and you go over there to a different place, not even AEW, you go to IMPACT, New Japan, wherever you go, and you still can't break through to the brass ring, start looking at yourselves a little bit. I'm not talking about anybody specifically. I'm talking about any male or female performer. Writer, manager, booker, anybody. Guy who works the lighting or the guy behind the camera. If you have issues everywhere you go, get out of the d*mn field. It's going to be there everywhere you go. There are going to be challenges. I'm sick of the notion of people thinking they can just leave their problems and they can go somewhere else and it's not going to be there. It's entertainment, there are going to be problems. There's a difference where, if you feel like the effort you're putting in, and the energy, and all the work that you're exceeding your payscale or workload or you think you're doing a lot more and you should be compensated for all that, then you should get into free agency, negotiate, start talking to other places. Maybe it'll work out better over there, but when you do that, and you get that compensation, you better work and earn that compensation.”
Consider the number of in-ring performers who have either been suspended or held out of action in AEW due to poor interpersonal relationships – to put it kindly – it's clear Strickland's words haven't exactly been heeded.
