AEW star and pro wrestling veteran Jeff Jarrett has given his thoughts on the bizarre social media activity that took place following the Grand Slam Australia special.
On February 15th, All Elite Wrestling resented its first show in Australia. Despite the fact that there was a hit crowd and the in-ring action was well-received, one of the biggest talking points of the show was that an 18×18 ring was used instead of the standard 20×20 that is regularly featured on TV tapings.
The use of the smaller ring led to many users online giving their thoughts on the matter one way or another, leading to a number of bizarre interactions over the next few days.
Aware of the discourse and the more negative comments about the ring, Jeff Jarrett spoke about the topic on his My World podcast. In regards to the negative comments from wrestling fans, Jarrett questioned the motivation behind it:
“Late last night when I logged in, I kind of saw the dominoes if you will. But man, it made kind of sit back and think just how — I don’t want to use the world tribalism or everything’s politicized, but it just feels like — It’s the old Jerry Lawler song, bad news travels like a wildfire, good news travels slow, they all call me wildfire because everybody knows I’m bad news.
It’s like, people jump in and want to hang on and if you don’t like the size of the ring, that’s okay too, I’m not trying to tell anybody what they can and can’t like. But my goodness, the negativity just continues to grow and grow and grow and grow. Hey, that’s okay too, but I think a lot of people in a weird kind of way, do they get joy out of it or does it make them happy, does it make them feel good? I can’t think of a lot of ways, maybe it gives them a shot of internal adrenaline like, ‘Ah, I’m gonna post this and tweet this whether it’s negative or this or that.’
Continuing, Jarrett looked to focus on the positives of the show, noting that 14,000 people had a great time that night:
“I get clicks creates cash and controversy creates cash and that whole mentality but Conrad, you know me as well as anybody, I’m just such a huge fan of professional wrestling continuing to do big live gates in all of the international markets because — no disrespect to Japan or Germany or any of these other markets but wrestling is really looked at in today’s world economy as a US product and its exported around the world. The more success that can happy internationally, I absolutely love it.
When you have that kind of crowd, you can choose to forget about any backstory, what you do and you don’t want to believe, but at the end of the day, you just kind of ran through the highlights. No matter how you slice and dice it, there were 14,000 international fans that had a fantastic time or they sure acted like they had a fantastic time because they were on their feet for the better part of the show.”
Why Did AEW Use A Smaller Ring?
With the smaller ring catching the attention of many fans, a number of incorrect theories started to circulate as to why AEW did not use their regular ring for the show. Setting the record straight, the reason for the smaller ring being used at AEW Grand Slam was revealed.
H/t to Fightful.