Between The Young Bucks, the Lucha Bros., the Best Friends, Angelico & Jack Evans and SoCal Uncensored, AEW is coming out of the gate with one of the strongest tag team divisions in all of professional wrestling. According to company president Tony Khan, the plan is for tag team wrestling to be one of the company’s biggest strengths at it enters its upcoming television deal with TNT starting this fall.
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Khan appeared on The Steve Austin Show on Tuesday and discussed his upcoming plans for the division.
“We’re super focused on it,” Khan said. “One of the things we’re going to be focused on and something we’re going to do is establish a great tag team division.”
Austin responded by thanking Khan, saying “I love that s—!”
“When we launch our weekly television show in the fall, we’re going to be doing a tag team tournament that’s going to have some of the greatest tag team matches ever on TV,” Khan continued. “We’re going to be starting that, it’s going to be one of the main focuses of our TV. There’s going to be team’s competing to get a first-round bye in that tournament, which is a big deal. And we’ve got some of the best tag teams in all of wrestling competing for our tag team championship coming up in the fall.”
The Bucks took on the Lucha Bros. in one of the headlining matches at AEW’s debut event, Double or Nothing, which Khan referred to as a “modern classic.” Other potential tag teams that could enter the tournament include Cody Rhodes & Dustin Rhodes, Luchasaurus & Jungle Boy, Private Party, Strong Hearts and The Dark Order.
As of now AEW has only introduced one championship — the AEW World Championship. The first champion is scheduled to be crowned at the sold-out All Out in a bout between Chris Jericho and Adam “Hangman” Page.
In a recent interview with ComicBook.com, Cody Rhodes explained the thought process behind the design for the title.
“The founder of AEW, Tony Khan is a lifelong wrestling fan,” Rhodes said. “You can ask him about any talent, the most obscure, and he can tell you where they had their run, how many stars were in this match. It’s really crazy but him and I had watched the Mid-South the North American Title was so large. Bill Watts was wearing it and it was so large. We thought, we really want this big, big belt. Then we went to The Ace of Belts, Dave Millican, he knew exactly what we were going for. We went through some edits back and forth with the other EVPs. We were so happy with how it turned out.
“It’s probably about five pounds heavier than the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship,” he continued. “That’s the heaviest belt I had ever seen. It’s really a solid chunk of change. The person who’s got to put that in their carry-on bag is going to have some fun at TSA but it’s inspired a lot by the Mid-South and the larger titles in our industry.”
