When Kevin Kelly was relieved of his duty as the play-by-play announcer on AEW Collision, rumors swirled about why it happened and, frankly, why it took Tony Khan so long to pull the proverbial trigger.
Initially announced for the show as part of a two-man booth with Ring of Honor legend Nigel McGuinness, Kelly quickly fell out of favor with fans because of his repeated mispronunciations of wrestlers' names, his rambly style of commentary, and for seemingly not watching the rest of AEW's product, as he would routinely not understand why things were happening in a certain way despite being responsible for telling that very story to the fans watching along at home as an on-screen expert.
Factor in his social media usage, which rapidly turned into taking public shots at fellow commentator Ian Riccaboni, and Kelly was let go on March 8th, 2024, just nine months after his initial hiring.
Discussing how things went down from his perspective in an appearance on a K&S WrestleFest digital signing, Kelly explained how the initial dram began and how it quickly spiraled out of control before his very eyes.
“I start doing AEW, and Tony Khan told me, ‘I wanted Ian Riccaboni to do Collision, but he couldn't because of his day job.' So, Ian recommended me. Great, cool. I go away to the G1, it was five weeks, I come back, and Ian is [talking about me] on Discord and a New Japan message board that I did all these different things to him over the years, which I never knew, I had no clue. To top it all off, he accuses me of being some QAnon conspiracy theorist for supporting a movie that was against child trafficking. That's neither here nor there. The part that bothers me so much is that I thought we were friends. If he would have called me, we could have talked about it. ‘Hey Kevin, listen, you're really pissing me off.' Even if we would have agreed to never be friends, and he would have called me up to say, ‘F you, I hate you, I never want to see you again,' at least I would have known where I stood. Then, I could work towards fixing what I had done wrong,” Kevin Kelly explained via Fightful.
“Instead, the way that he went about it painted me with a nasty brush. It was done on purpose so that the fans would turn against me. He did it in a New Japan Discord board. People were messaging me, that I'm friends with, I go there all the time. That's how I found out about it. Post-G1, I wake up, ‘Let's see what they're saying about us. Hey, wait a minute, what the h*ll.' People that I'm friendly with were like, ‘What is Ian doing? Why is he doing this?' I have no idea, so I message him. ‘What's going on?' ‘You said and did a bunch of different things to me over the years, so I'm pissed off about it.' ‘Okay, let's talk about it.' ‘I'll only talk if you guarantee you're not going to record the call.' I wouldn't know how to record a call. ‘Sure, we need to talk about it.'”
Whoa, interesting stuff, right? Well, wait, it gets even more so, as Kelly had plenty more to say about the subject, including some interesting insight into the behind-the-scenes drama of Collision during the final days of CM Punk.
Kevin Kelly knew the writing was on the wall in AEW.
Fast forward to actually calling matches on Collison in 2023, and Kevin Kelly noted that after spending years doing things the NJPW way, he felt increasingly stressed out as a member of AEW, noting that he knew the writing was on the wall well before he was let go.
“Then, things started to change within AEW. It was never a good fit, me being there. I came from New Japan, where I was left alone, and I knew what I was doing. I was calling matches that were just like AEW and all of a sudden now, I have all these people in my ear and all this format stuff. ‘Why do we have to do things the same way Dynamite is?' That's what I said. ‘Why do we have to be the same show? Don't we want Collision to be different?'” Kevin Kelly asked. “Whether it was split because of CM Punk and the Bucks, I have no idea. That was never brought up. It was a separate show, Saturday night, let's make it different and do different things. I'm different than Taz, Excalibur, and Schiavone. The handwriting was on the wall. It wasn't going to work, and I was getting more and more p**sed off. I talked to the AEW office about it, I talked to them, and I told them I was mentally getting in a bad spot over this too. I vented. When I vented, that's when they let me go. No harm, no foul with AEW. Big blame there. I was willing to straighten things out with Ian. I feel terrible that he was mad at me over something that he never told me, and it led to a bunch of different problems.”
Asked if Riccaboni ever actually aired out his issues, Kelly noted that there was one case in which the ROH commentator was upset with him for making fun of him for wearing a cowboy hat in Calgary behind his back.
“One incident in particular, he did spell out for me. I did say it to him, I meant it in a….I won't go into it. I didn't get a chance to explain it, but I understood how it could be taken the wrong way,” Kelly noted. “The other thing he said was I knocked him for wearing a hat on Collision, which I did, the cowboy hat, because he's sitting next to Jim Ross. They were in Calgary for the Stampede. I was saying it because, guess what, you're going to get heat from JR if you're wearing a cowboy hat sitting next to him. Whether he says it's okay or not, that doesn't matter. It was born in Calgary and the Stampede. He's the one that wears a f**king cowboy hat, why would you do that? Ian got upset about that. Give me a break.”
Who is in the wrong here, Riccaboni, Kelly, or maybe AEW as a whole? Either way, when the former Collision announcer was asked if he had ill will towards Tony Khan's company, he let fans know the answer was a resounding yes, as he felt he was treated in a way he would never treat anyone else.
“Of course,” Kelly asserted. “I wouldn't treat my worst enemy like that.”
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