As chaos reigns in All Elite Wrestling Booker T has revealed how he would go about resolving the issues.
Following comments made by CM Punk during the post-All Out media scrum, a brawl broke out backstage. The fight involved Punk, the Young Bucks, Kenny Omega and Ace Steel while other figures were also part of the melee.
This incident has led to a raft of suspensions, while the AEW World Championship and the AEW Trios Championship were declared vacant. Although the latter has since been won by Death Triangle.
Wrestling veteran Booker T has seen his fair share of backstage incidents, spending decades working for the likes of WWE and WCW. Speaking on his Hall of Fame podcast, the former World Champion explained how he would go about resolving the issues. Booker began by breaking down why any personal problems between talents should have been dealt with behind closed doors.
“If it was all true, if it was a shoot, that’s the way you really felt, my thing is this man. I’m not here to let the fans in on what we got going on personally. The fans don’t need to know if I got a beef with any of these guys in the back. I’m serious. That isn’t something that I think is professional.
If I gotta beef with Hangman Adam Page saying what he said, I’m gonna deal with it one on one in the locker room, and if we got to fight about it, we’ll fight about it. Whatever we got to do to get it off our chest, we’ll do it. If I’ve got a problem with The Young Bucks, I’m going to tell those guys to their face. It’s not something for the world to really know unless you just want them to know it, unless you just want the fans to know, hey, man, I don’t like these guys.
Okay, why did they have to know that? I don’t know. Maybe to create more heat going between them when they work? I don’t know.
Maybe that’s the thought process anyway, but for business purposes and business purposes only, it’s just like I got a worker, just say for instance, if I had The Undertaker and he was working today and he was on my television and then next thing you know he wants to go on Twitch and go outside of the boundaries of what we are trying to do with him on television, it would be a problem, and in this situation right here going into a situation like this of creating something like this, if it’s real, it would be a problem.”
Now that the problems are all out of the open, Booker T broke down what he would do next.
“I would have an intervention. Everybody would have to come to the table, and the one thing that everybody got to know is that, damn it, I’m in charge. If somebody doesn’t like that, they can walk out. There’s the door. They can move right now. But if everybody doesn’t understand that I’m running this show and this is the way we’re going to do it going forward, and the thing is in a meeting like that, I don’t even really need to hear a whole lot of, it’s not like a question and answer situation. It’s my way or the highway situation because right now, we’re playing with my money.
That’s the way I would deal with it and that’s just me. I’m not talking about Tony Khan. That’s the way I would deal with it and if the guys that didn’t want to play ball, they could take their ball and go home.”
In the days after the incident following All Out it has been reported that many within AEW believe that Punk’s outburst at the media scrum was pre-planned.
H/t to WrestlingNewsCo for the transcription.