AEW wrestler Kenny Omega recently made an appearance on the Swerve City Podcast to discuss a wide range of topics.
During the podcast, Omega spoke about Cody Rhodes’ impact on AEW, and more. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
Rhodes knowing what the company needed: “There’s only three (EVPs in AEW now) and I won’t say the fourth EVP. We can’t mention his name. I’m just kidding, it’s Cody (Rhodes)… I’ll assume that this is just from knowledge of being in the business all his life. He was born into the business and he understood a lot from his father. He knew what we needed, he knew what we needed to line up and the things that I couldn’t get so it’s like, okay, I’ve got good contacts for any unsigned Japanese talents that you guys need. I can be that guy and The Bucks would be like, ‘Okay. We know some great guys from SoCal, we know some great indie guys that we can get’ and Cody’s like, ‘Okay, cool. Well how about this guy, this guy, this guy.’ We would have the list of talent or whatever and we would put them together but then Cody’s like, ‘Okay, what are we gonna do about medical staffing?’ And it’s like, oh, that’s right! We need that too. We should have doctors so he’s like, ‘Okay, I’ve got a contact for Doc. Sampson’ and I was like, ‘Okay. That’s probably not gonna be enough’ so I had a dude down here, you know, Bryce (Ready). So Bryce, and I thought, ‘Hey man, I know that you’ve taken care of some of our guys and you really love wrestling and the business. Would you maybe be able to take a full-time opportunity doing that?’ So we were able to get trainers through that and it’s like, okay, what else do we need? Oh boy, we need producers for TV. We need guys that actually have experience doing wrestling production on TV so again, that was a Cody thing where, ‘Okay, yep. I can get in touch with this guy, this guy, this guy’ and then The Bucks maybe knew a guy and I would know a guy but it was like, at the beginning, just to build that small little bit of infrastructure which we didn’t have, when you start checking names off the box. Like, okay, we got this, this, this, this, this. It’s like, you think you’re there but you’re not because we were so understaffed in the beginning and even to this day, I could probably, confidently, hell, we could use an extra trainer or two, you know what I mean? The tables are always busy. But we could use an extra trainer or two. We could have a couple other gophers or whatever in case that we’re running low on certain materials and things.”
Early criticisms of AEW’s television: “Year one of our company, a lot of people would say maybe there’s too many cooks in the kitchen where we had Tony’s ideas for stories, we have The Bucks, we would have mine and then we’d have Cody’s ideas and if I had to work with Cody (Rhodes) on a story, the way that we’d go about it might be completely different and it might not work. But I think it’s because we had that; we had that variety that it brought interest to the company. I think too much of the same-same is only gonna get the same-same amount of people showing up, you know what I mean? You need to have that variety, so I think it’s very important.”
