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Before AEW was recording huge gates at Wembley Stadium, partnering up with the Texas Rangers for an American Stadium show – All In: Texas – and finding unique ways to build their brand, like partnering up with Warner Brothers Discovery to present TNT Overdrive, the biggest shot Tony Khan cooked up to get his show more attention was to bring in Shaquille O'Neal to wrestle alongside a debuting Jade Cargill against Cody Rhodes and Red Velvet.
Gosh, now that is one heck of a 2020-21 sentence if I've ever seen one.
Wrestling a single match for the promotion on Dynamite, hitting a few Big Show-esque moves while the “American Nightmare” sold his behind off for the Hall of Famer, things took a strange turn when Shaq left the venue in an ambulance but “disappeared” in a regular “who done it” moment that has perplexed AEW fans ever since.
… until now.
That's right, in an appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show, TK finally revealed how that “cliffhanger” went down and who came up with the idea.
“I don't think it serves us well to close the loop because I think Shaq wanted to leave it open-ended for him to come back. He saw that being a really good cliffhanger to a return, and I think he's right,” Khan explained via Fightful. “People are still talking about it, and it's been three and a half years. What he was going for clearly worked because he wanted a cliffhanger that leads to his return. When Shaq is ready to wrestle again, that will be a perfect entry point for him to return to the world of professional wrestling. We loved having Shaq in AEW.”
Wait, so the plan was to bring back Shaq in the future? What happened to prevent that from happening, the exits of Rhodes and Cargill? His DJ career? Or maybe the fact that QT Marshall may have lied about what he was doing, which caused the Orlando Magic legend to take some damage he wasn't expecting? Until he returns, fans will have to keep wondering about AEW's biggest mystery.
QT Marshall explained how he lied to Shaquille O'Neal
Speaking of Marshall's lie to the “Big Aristotle,” the former Nightmare Family member spilled the beans shortly after the match back in 2021 to Digital Spy, explaining that O'Neal believed there would be heavy padding under the table he smashed through, which was never a part of the plan.
“He picked up on it very quickly,” Marshall said. “He's a wrestling fan, so the moment that you asked him what he wanted to do, he already had a whole list of things that were in his mind that he was going to do to somebody, and it was just about teaching him the right way to do it without hurting himself,” Marshall told Digital Spy.
“He said something about maybe going through some tables, and I told him, ‘Oh, it won't be that bad; we'll put a really thick pad underneath,' which was not true. I just didn't want him to back out of it. So it was a lot of fun, as soon as he came in the back, right away, he said, ‘You lied to me! There was no pad under there!' That's wrestling; welcome to wrestling.”
So is Marshall the reason why Shaq hasn't returned to AEW? More likely than not, yes, but hey, if there's one saving grace, it's that O'Neal does have a long-standing feud with Paul Wight dating back to his time in WWE as Big Show, and if the timing and opportunity is right, who knows, maybe fans could finally see the duo duke it out.
“I hear Paul Wight's still talking trash, so I'm going to work out really hard this summer, and maybe we could do something very, very soon,” O'Neal told Pop Culture via Cominbook.com. “Last time, it was due out of bureaucracy and red tape; now, there is no red tape. So, I'm going to go on because I'm still kind of sore from the table, so I'm going to go for it this summer, pump these muscles up here. I'll be waiting for you, Mr. Paul.”
Would a match between 2024 Wight and 2025 Shaq be any good? Objectively speaking, no, but if you give either man a tag team partner, or have them work a trios match where their actual in-ring time is limited to a few big guy moves, who knows, maybe AEW could pop a big rating on television or get some additional buys on a PPV in the future with the two men booked, especially if QT spends that show at home.
