AEW President Tony Khan has fired back at Eric Bischoff in an expletive-filled rant after Bischoff called Punk a “financial flop” since coming to AEW.
Eric Bischoff has made several disparaging comments over recent months in regards to AEW, but the former WCW President attracted the most headlines when he questioned how successful CM Punk had been in a financial sense since debuting for AEW in August 2021.
Now at the post-Double Or Nothing media scrum Tony Khan has not held back on his thoughts about Bischoff’s comments on the new AEW World Champion:
“That’s f*cking bullsh*t. There is only one person that can attest to that, I don’t know about other people. I can only attest to what’s happened here and public record and some of these things are a matter of public record because of freedom of information.”
“We do have, over the years, a good amount of financial data in pro wrestling. I can tell you, no one wrestler has ever come in and made a bigger plus financial difference in the history of my company going into the third year anniversary, no one person has ever made a more positive impact.”
“We just did a record pay-per-view buy, every pay-per-view, he’s done a four pay-per-view cycle now, every one of them was the record. Whether it was All Out, where he was huge part of the draw with Darby, his debut was a huge thing with the First Dance, the biggest Rampage draw in the history of that show.”
Tony Khan then alludes to the lesser-known “Friday Night War” between AEW and WWE programming, saying that WWE counsel Jerry McDevitt accepted that AEW had won that war and CM Punk was a big part of that:
“The matches, he carried the Friday Night War, which, by the way, is a matter of record in f*cking court in the state of California that we won the Friday Night War.”
“Just ask Jerry McDevitt because he f*cking wrote it. This guy won it, vs. Matt Sydal, who is a great wrestler, he had another goddamn great match on Friday night. This f*cking guy, he f*cking did the Friday Night War, he did the First Dance, he’s done the record Double or Nothing. He did the record All Out in his debut. He was a big part of the record Full Gear, a great match with Eddie Kingston.”
“He’s wrestled a bunch of young guys and veterans in-between there. Will Hobbs, Daniel Garcia, then he showed up and did the biggest program in terms of everything, TV, box office, ever with MJF. Then he did the goddamn main event here. He’s the biggest part of the financial success in the history of this company. Let’s f*cking go!”