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Scorpio Sky Explains His AEW Absence, TNT Champion, Ethan Page & Men Of The Year, Chris Jericho
Scorpio Sky (@ScorpioSky) is a professional wrestler currently signed to AEW. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood to talk about his absence from TV and how he is ready to return to the ring, being a 2-time TNT Champion, his custom LA Lakers title, being a part of Sting's first live match in AEW, handing Chris Jericho his first loss in AEW, throwing Darby Allin down a flight of stairs, his time in WWE as part of the anger management segments with Daniel Bryan and Kane as "Harold", whether there were ever any plans to do more in WWE and more!
Quote I'm thinking about: "Who you are becoming is more important than you who have you been" - Hal Elrod
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"That's been the question. I guess I've been in and out over the last couple of years. Some of it has been due to injury, some of it due to bad luck. One thing I will say is there's a narrative out that I'm just this injury-prone guy, like he's gone for a long time and he comes back and he gets hurt again. That's actually not the case. So I'm actually glad I want to be able to address that. I did get hurt about two years ago but I was okay, and within like a couple of weeks. But the problem is when you fall out of the rotation, we have so much talent, that it's hard to get back in the rotation. I always compare it to a Ferris Wheel. Right? You're up at the top at one point. But you're gonna go down and you'd kind of have to wait your turn to get back up there and that's a little bit of what happens. So I have had a couple of injuries over the last few years but for the most part, I've been healthy for 80%."
"I think it's just like I was saying, it's really tough to get back into the rotation. Because we have so much talent, there's always talent coming in that it's almost out of sight, out of mind, in a way, best way I can describe it. I'm eager to get back into the ring though and flex my muscles a little bit, I'm in really good shape I'm working out with Cesar and I'm excited. And not only in AEW, I want to get back on the indy scene, because I haven't done the indies in a number of years. And so that would be a really fun thing for me to kind of go back to my roots and see who's out there, see who are the hot names, and go and have some bangers with them."
"I hurt my knee two years ago when I had the TNT title, somewhere along that I don't even remember what match it was. But somewhere in there, I think was one of our multi-man matches when we were working against Sammy [Guevara]. I just, I don't even remember what the exact diagnosis was, but it was It wasn't anything too crazy. All I needed was about five or six weeks, I got some PRP and I was good to go after that. But it was just right after that happened is when Brawl Out happened. Everything kind of turned upside down after that. So I kind of moved to the back burner and there was a lot of things that needed to get worked out not involving me and I understood that."
"I'm ready. I think we're just waiting for the right opportunity, for the right situation. Again, there are a lot of guys in the company and people coming in all the time. And obviously our relationship with other companies like New Japan, that provides us extra talent. And so it's just a little tough sometimes to work your way back into the rotation. It's not unlike, say basketball or something, right? Like you get injured, you might lose your spot as a starter and maybe somebody else comes in and they kill it in that spot. So you come back and it's like, hey, like, we're winning without you. So you got to figure out a way to get yourself back on the floor."
"I’ve come so far since then, when we had that first conversation, we were just getting started. I was learning, I knew how to be a television wrestler but I've learned so much more since, and I'm still learning and I think I'm very far from hitting my ceiling. I'm getting so much better at this even without being in the ring, just by watching, just by observing, just by thinking back to things I've done and how I could have done this better and that sort of thing. I'm improving mentally, even without being in the ring physically. So I think I can do this for a number of more years, 5-10 more years if I want to. The sky's the limit, for lack of a better term. I'd like to get in there with the top guys, and there's a lot of guys really all over the world that I would like to wrestle. I see guys on our show. I see guys on WWE, and I'm like, dang, that guy would be a really fun guy to wrestle. Some of these matches, obviously, will never happen, most likely, I'm probably never gonna wrestle John Cena. That was just the name [I’m] throwing out there. But there's a lot of talent and I get motivated when I see these guys, and I want to hang with them. You can kind of see like, I'm really good, I think at bringing the best out of guys. So I'll see some guys and I'm just like, let me get my hands on him. I can really just, you know, bring this thing out of him, and that would be so much fun to do. So again, we're reaching back to, I gotta get back in the ring. That's the ultimate goal is getting back in the ring first, and then everything else will take care of itself."
"I think that we didn't capitalize on that the way we should have. That was kind of the thing with Sammy and I, he was the babyface, I was the heel and then they started turning during and we didn't lean right into that. At the time I was thinking like, I need to probably go babyface here, listen to the audience. But that wasn't really the plan. So it was a little bit of a push and pull type of situation where we probably should have just listened to the audience and said, okay, this is where we're gonna go. That's how we could have capitalized on that moment. But yeah, that was absolutely a moment. The funny thing about that too, is it ended up making it better, but there was a mess up because Sammy got a little bit rocked in that match. So when we watched the match, he falls off the ladder onto the barbed wire ladders. That was supposed to be the finish. But like a spot or two to before that he was going to do a springboard up on the ladder. And I was gonna knock him off. But we skipped it because he was kind of rocked. So we're like, okay, let's get home or whatever. So I knock him off the ladder. He hits the barbed wire. I start climbing. I look and I see him getting up. I'm like, is he getting up? What's he doing? He's supposed to stay down. He springboards jumped on the ladder. He's like, what's next? You're supposed to stay down. He goes, Oh, sorry. I was like, It's okay. Just go back down! But it made it better, because the crowd after I knocked him down the second time. They were like, Oh, we know he's winning this time. So you feel them build build, build and then I finally grabbed the belt. That's when you had that big explosion. So I'm glad he did it. I got I'm not happy you got rocked. But I'm glad that mistake took place."
"That's one of my favorite matches ever. I have two matches that are my favorite matches I've ever had and that's one of them. The cool thing about that was, in the beginning, Sting told us ‘When I signed here it was only to do cinematic matches. I was never supposed to do an in-ring match.’ He's like, but I trust you guys. And so that was like, Okay, we can't mess this up. So we, we just did the best we could to obviously protect him. But he's a maniac and wants to do crazy things as well. he's like diving off the stage, he’s like suplex me on the stage. It was just like are you sure? okay. He’s a nut. He was in great shape. We had to talk him into not wearing a shirt. He wanted to wear his shirt. We're like bro you're in great shape."
"We actually went to his house probably a week prior because we just wanted him to be very comfortable. So Ethan and I on our day off, we were like, we'll go to your house, and we'll talk about it. So we went and he has a ring and everything. We went and we just kind of went over a few things, just to get the feel of it. We came up with the finish and the come back and it all came together so easily, honestly. Because it's like, again, you have a guy who's over and Darby, too. I mean, I don't want to sell him short, Darby is incredibly over as well. So whatever they do is going to work and the story was there. So we could go in there and even if the match itself wasn't incredible, the story was there. That's what I liked so much about it was a very clean, laid out story that was simple and easy for fans to follow. They followed it and they bought in. And so going out and doing the match was just easy at that point."
"The thing that people always bring up though, and I did this on purpose, just because I like to just throw a little comedy into everything. So he attacked us and we're like fighting, at one point, there's this clip and I'm just running holding a trash can. And I run like what feels like 20 feet. And I'm just like ah! Because it's so goofy, like, I'm just reading and holding this trash can, people always brought that up to me. They're just like, that was so ridiculous. Like, I know I had to do something. But yeah, we throw them down those stairs and Darby talk about another maniac, man, he just took it. And that was, he could have got seriously hurt doing that."
"Sure did, back in 2019 on the early Dynamite days yeah, he was like undefeated at the time. He's a world champion and then pinned him and then we did the whole face-to-face interview thing and then I wrestled him for the title. He ended up going off with Moxley after that, which was a good little transition."
"I always tell people like Chris Jericho legitimized AEW in the early days. Because people looked at us and they knew there was talent and they're like, Okay, Young Bucks, FCU, Kenny Omega yada, yada. But when Chris Jericho signs on, that's when like, the television networks are like, Oh, okay, they've got a guy. I always think it's similar to when Hulk Hogan went to WCW in the mid-90s. It's just like, it puts that stamp, okay, we're we've arrived. For him to come in, and take young talent like myself, like Jungle Boy, Darby, I just described myself as a younger talent [laughs]. But also, he's worked with so many guys, and made us all good in some way, shape, or form, whether he won the match or not. He put us up there with him and he doesn't have to do that. But that just shows he's a giving guy and that helped me a lot in the very early stages of AEW."
"So there was there was the situation I talked to you about last time, but then there was also another situation where I'd worked in 2012. I'd worked a couple of shows for TNA and then I was called to go do a tryout. They did like this LA tryout and I think it's the one that Adam Pearce and Bayley got signed at. I was there and a few other guys but I had done TNA right before that, and at the time, there was like a lawsuit or something going on between two companies. So the moment I showed up, there was one of the producers that pulls me aside and he said, Hey, you just did TNA. I don't know how this slipped through the cracks, but we can't have you here. They had canceled LA Knight I think two days prior, he was also supposed to be at that tryout. So they told him not to come too, because of that same thing. So after that I didn't even really try to be honest with you, I just kind of went my own route of like, alright, well, let's see what I can do it on the Indies and that sort of thing. So I just kind of worked my way towards an opposite direction. I kind of had the thinking of like, well, if nothing's going to happen there, I'm just gonna make my myself a star without them and I just kind of went the hard route."
"I've never watched those, I've still never seen it. Yeah, it was funny, that was a lot of fun to do, though. At the time, I had no idea it was going to be a thing. I didn't know people would still talk about it now. I was like, okay. I didn't even want to be Harold actually, like I showed up and they had like these name tags. My thinking was just I'm not gonna get hired off of this. So let me just eat some catering and sit in the corner and collect my check. So I grabbed a nametag and I wrote Kobi on it. I was like, I'll be Kobi and I just sat in the corner. Then they're like, no, no, no, you're Harold. Oh, shoot. Okay, I have lines, but a lot of it was improv too. I think there was a line where I put my hand on Kane’s thigh. And that one, I just did it, it wasn't planned. I think the line was something like, Thank you for sharing Kane, it was just one of those things I had fun with and I didn't expect anything of it. I didn't even watch it. I was just hanging out at home one day and I noticed my twitter at the time had blown up. I was like, Oh, I guess they aired that tonight. So it's funny. That was the same weekend of the tryout that I just told you about. so I went to the tryout like two days later, and I was like, hey, you know, I just filmed some stuff, a few days ago. [They said] I don't know, that has nothing to do with me."
"No but there was talk of bringing me back though at one point. They called me maybe a month or so later and they said, Hey, we're interested in bringing you to Stamford to shoot some more anger management stuff. And I was like, Oh, cool. Yeah, I'm available. And they said, okay, but first, we have to know what is your relationship with TNA? And I was like, I have no relationship. I didn't have a contract. I just did a couple of dates for them and that's it. And they were like, okay, and I never heard anything else."
"Resilience, health and to be a part of the wrestling business."
