Swerve Strickland Claims Political Moves Ruined WWE Career
Swerve Strickland has revealed why he thinks his time in WWE didn’t pan out despite him going on to find incredible success in AEW.
Swerve Strickland lost his AEW World Championship at All In to Bryan Danielson in a hugely emotional match that also saw Danielson put his wrestling career on the line.
However, climbing that ladder to success in the first place was a long way from Strickland’s time in WWE which saw him released by the company in November 2021 – just six weeks after he was drafted to the company’s main roster.
Speaking on The Rich Eisen Show before All In Swerve Strickland had a straightforward response when asked why his time in WWE didn’t work out:
Political moves. Just political moves, I can say. I’ll just leave it at ‘political moves.’
Swerve Strickland Just Wanted An Opportunity In AEW
Strickland was then asked what he expected from AEW when he joined Tony Khan’s company at Revolution 2022:
Opportunity and time. I worked my way up from the bottom, I don’t care. You can put me in battle royals, I’ll lose them all, I don’t care. Just give me the opportunity to show out.
Give me the opportunity like ‘Hey, can I get a minute of TV time right here in this spot?’ ‘Absolutely’ ‘Okay, I’m going to make something matter.’ That’s something that you just can’t ask for anywhere else. You can’t just ask for a minute and get it, that’s really tough. I don’t care if it’s Dynamite, Rampage or Collision or Ring of Honor, getting television time forwarded to you is valuable. It’s up to you what you do with it.
It’s about opportunity because there’s a lot of people out there I know that are very, very talented that would dream of getting a minute’s worth of television opportunity.
Swerve Strickland added that he had to build a relationship with AEW and Tony Khan as well as learn that sometimes it wasn’t all about him:
It was also a relationship that I had to build with Tony and All Elite Wrestling. It wasn’t always about me and what I wanted, and I had to learn that too. Through my tenure at AEW, I had to learn like ‘What is it that Tony needs? What can I provide that Tony needs right now?