Swerve Strickland Offers Advice To Released WWE Stars
Swerve Strickland has told wrestling’s latest batch of free agents to get creative.
After impressing across the independent scene, Swerve Strickland signed with WWE in 2019. Following the switch, Strickland continued to make progress and seemed to be destined for big things when called up to the main roster as part of Hit Row in late 2021.
However, just weeks after arriving on SmackDown, the entire faction had been released.
Strickland wasted little time in continuing his career and signed with AEW in March 2022, going on to become World Champion. In the process, he’s become one of the biggest stars in the entire company.
Swerve Strickland Tells Released Stars To Create Opportunities
During a recent episode of the Battleground Podcast, Strickland was asked whether he had any advice for wrestling’s latest raft of free agents. Having been in their shoes, the now-AEW star urged wrestlers to use their newfound freedom to create new opportunities.
“A lot of those guys have had their gripes of how they’ve been used for the last several years, all the opportunities that they thought they had that they were taken away from. All of them felt like they were short-handed and short-changed in a lot of different ways.
All the things that you weren’t allowed to do, or the opportunities that were taken away from you, now you have the chance to create it for yourself.”
Strickland added that as a free agent, time belongs to the talent and no one else. This means that they can work to get back what they felt was taken away.
“Now there’s nobody there to tell you no. There’s nobody there to say, ‘Oh, we’ll wait on you, and then we’ll get back to you,’ and then you hear nothing for six months. Like there’s nobody to take your time away… No, the time is now for not later. And it’s not dedicated to somebody else to offer you that time. The time is yours.
Take that time and cherish it and understand, like now you get other people to respect your time. Because that’s something like nobody can pay you for. You can’t buy time,” he said. “Take that of all the years, or the months or the moments that were taken away from you, get it back.”
More pointedly, Strickland urged wrestlers not to wait for opportunities, telling them this is their chance to make things happen.
“Don’t wait around for anybody or for anything. And make people come to you. Don’t run for somebody else. Make them come to you and be so good and get your leverage back. Industry, it’s the hardest thing to truly turn into value is to gain that leverage, gain that that want, that need for you.”
Back in August 2024, Swerve Strickland signed a huge new contract with AEW that will keep him tied to the company until 2029.
H/t to WrestlingNews.Co