Shane "Swerve" Strickland is enjoying The Mogul Embassy.
He's enjoying All Elite Wrestling.
Because of this, he's not taking calls from WWE right now.
The number one ranked contender in the current AEW Rankings recently appeared as a guest on the Smooth Vega podcast for an interview, during which he revealed he didn't even answer a phone call he received from WWE not too long ago.
Strickland brought this up while talking about WWE bringing back Hit Row without him in 2022 and how it didn't feel the same or work the same without him being part of the presentation.
"That comes from experience. I had a different experience than those guys had," he said of the rest of Hit Row. "I’ve known how to build myself from the ground up on the independents. I knew how to hustle, get here, get to there, put on performances and matches, and then go, ‘How do I get that?’ Then monetize that into this and make this into something. Everything, throughout my career, and to this day, I apply; one thing leads to another and to another."
He continued, "That’s kind of how you see those little things in my entrance and my music, my wrestling, my look, the sound, all that was weaving together from going from here to here to hustling. That’s something those guys still need to learn. It’s tough in that organization, WWE, it’s really tough creatively when you don’t have your hands on your creative, and it’s left to the powers that be to maneuver you how they see fit, and that’s not easy for anybody. For me, I was in a place where I knew I needed to be. I needed to be in AEW. When I got the phone call to go back, I didn’t even answer it. It was, ‘Nope.'"
Check out the complete interview at Apple.com. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.
