President Tony Khan confused a whole lot of people when he recently introduced the National Championship
to AEW by linking it to the lineage of the NWA National Heavyweight Championship. Needless to say, plenty of NWA wrestlers weren’t happy about it, including the real National Champion.It has since been clarified that the AEW National Championship is a brand new title with no connection at all to that belt. But Tony Khan still had to clear the air about this confusing situation with NWA President
Billy Corgan. Tony was streaming live on social media last night when he said they had a very nice talk about it.
“There’s been a lot of talk about the National title, and the National title match. There’s been talk from people in and outside AEW. It’s been really interesting. Of course, the National championship will be decided at AEW Full Gear. But when I recently announced it, I saw a lot of talk online. There was chatter from even wrestlers from other promotions, people all over. And wrestlers are gonna talk. Wrestlers are gonna say stuff, that’s totally cool.
But I ended up having a really nice conversation about it with the President of the NWA, Billy Corgan. Because, of course, the NWA National Championship has a great history of its own, and when we created a National champion, I saw NWA wrestlers saying, hey, we have a National title. Well, AEW’s a separate company, we have our own lineage. And I’d like to just say that Billy, I have a lot of respect for him. I have a lot of respect for what he’s doing. I really love the traditions of pro wrestling, and I had a really nice talk with Billy. We hadn’t talked in a long time, so I think it was good for him to hear this. I respect him and I respect the NWA, and we’re trying to do something different here.
We brought pro wrestling back to TBS, but there are a lot of promotions that have had a great history on TBS before AEW, and one of them is the NWA. And I think it’s great that Billy is trying to keep that tradition alive and revive it. So we had a really nice talk about this. So, to any of the wrestlers anywhere in the world, and particularly some of you in the NWA, you might be happy to hear Billy and I had a very nice talk about this, and I’m sure he would say the same.”
From the way Khan talks about his chat with Corgan, you’d never even know that they are apparently battling in court right now.
The first ever AEW National Champion will be crowned next Saturday (Nov. 22) at AEW’s Full Gear pay-per-view in a Casino gauntlet match, with stars like Bobby Lashley and Ricochet already throwing their names in the hat. Tony Khan said there will be matches soon to determine which wrestlers get the first two entries in the match.
Are you happy to hear that Tony Khan and Billy Corgan had a nice, respectful conversation about AEW’s confusing new National championship? Let me know in the comments below, Cagesiders.
