If there is one thing AEW is doing differently than WWE, it's using managers. WWE used to rely heavily on managers in the '80s but got away from in the modern era. According to AEW President Tony Khan, it's all about getting back to what made managers so great in the first place.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Khan reveled in his fandom of old-school wrestling. Khan started watching wrestling around 1990 and caught up on the classic territories through the old tape-trading days of professional wrestling fandom.
It was those days of wrestling that made Khan a true fan of the sport. It is clear when watching AEW that Khan enjoys paying tribute to the legends of the past. Bret "The Hitman" Hart introduced the AEW World Championship, and the Rock 'N Roll Express did the same for the tag team titles. Finally, Khan brought back veteran stars like Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, Jake "The Snake" Roberts and Taz, and made them managers. According to Khan, it was the old-school style of creating wrestling managers, and he offered Jake Roberts as the perfect example.
"I thought [Jake Roberts] would be great with Lance. He had come in with DDP. DDP had, you know, worked with him and helped him get his life back on track. And when Lance Archer was coming in, I thought Jake would be the perfect person with him," Khan said. "I was feeding [Tony] Schiavoni lines, like, you know, 'this is like a young Jake Roberts. What a crazy weapon this is going to be for the twisted mind of Jake Roberts.' Now he's working with a guy who's got his ridiculous and super rare combination of size and agility. And that's the idea."
When talking about making guys like Roberts, Blanchard and Anderson managers, Khan looked at wrestlers from the past who could be great leading the new generation of stars -- guys who could use someone to talk and help mentor them. He compared it to what WCW did with Harley Race and what WWE did with former wrestlers like Bobby Heenan, Johnny Valiant and Freddie Blassie.
"I mentioned Vader and Harley Race. That's a great example of it," Khan explained. "You know, when I was a kid, I grew up on some of these great managers. And I think wrestling kind of got away from having managers who competed in the ring and had those insights like Bobby Heenan, like Harley Race. We tried to recreate some of that. I'm not saying every manager here is as great as the greatest managers."
He continued, "But yeah, absolutely, the Harley Race-Vader connection was something I looked at when I was a kid, and I thought that was a great manager for him. It made a lot of sense. Mr. Perfect and Ric Flair were more contemporaries in terms of age. So that's a little bit of a different thing. But Mr. Perfect was another. He had gone straight into management from wrestling and then even came back and wrestled again, but when I was a kid, he was one of my favorite wrestlers who had become one of my favorite managers. So yeah, I just think it's great. And those guys add a lot."
AEW Dynamite airs on Wednesday nights at 8/7c on TNT.