Subhojeet Mukherjee on July 8, 2021
The Wednesday Night Wars between WWE and AEW began in October 2019 as AEW Dynamite and NXT went head-to-head every week in order to see who would come out the better show. AEW Dynamite would win in the ratings war for the majority of the time. The Wars finally came to an end in April after NXT moved to Tuesday nights.
There was certainly a sense of rivalry between the two companies and their talents but it was never as heated as the Monday Night Wars between WWE and WCW.
While speaking to Riju Dasgupta, former WWE Superstar Killian Dain talked about if the NXT locker room watched AEW matches. Dain admitted that NXT Superstars would watch matches on AEW backstage when they weren’t booked in matches themselves.
“Like, so, I think people would love [for] me to say it was this rivalry or whatever else, but the truth is, you know when we were going head-to-head if they had a particularly good match, we’d wanted to watch; we’d watch! You know what I mean? We’d be backstage in the locker room; we’ll be like, ‘Oh, such and such, let’s see that.’ A lot of [them] are our friends, [as is] with a lot of the guys on the roster.
So for us, there was a professional rivalry so far as. Nobody wants to lose or anything like that, but at the same time, we knew it was great for the industry. We knew it was exactly what it was as us growing up watching, when it was WWF and WCW, maybe on a smaller scale, but for a lot of us, in the NXT locker room, it was a good way; an added motivation is probably the best way to put it. Listen, there’s no denying, if there is a really cool match, and we’re not doing something on the show that day, we’d be watching, you know what I mean because there were some crackers at the time.”
NXT Superstars and AEW stars are ultimately in the same pro wrestling business and they have a great deal of respect for each other in the end. It is certainly not surprising that NXT Superstars watched AEW matches for that reason.
July 8, 2021 8:26 am
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