The Young Bucks finally captured the AEW World Tag Team Championships on Saturday night by defeating FTR at the Full Gear pay-per-view. Up until then, the Bucks had repeatedly come up short in winning the gold, which was in stark contrast to their numerous championship reigns in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, Ring of Honor and Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. And yet when asked about the victory in a new interview with Sports Illustrated this week, the pair revealed they didn’t want to be champions for at least another year.
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“If we’d won them right away, there wouldn’t have been a struggle for our characters,” Nick Jackson said.. “We actually wanted to hold back for another year, so winning now was a Tony [Khan] call, but I’m glad it happened at the pay-per-view. It felt special, and winning it from FTR in this rivalry, in a match we never thought would happen, took it over the top.”
“We wanted our story to be painful,” Matt Jackson added “So we kept losing, and when you finally thought we’d start winning, we’d lose more. Being fans, we know the feeling of when that pain turns to celebration, and this was the right time for us. We competed in arguably the biggest tag-team match of the last five years and finally won the tag titles in the company we helped start. Does it get any bigger than that?”
AEW originally advertised the Bucks defending their titles against the masked tag team Top Flight, but quickly pulled the announcement down.
Matt Jackson’s leg injury played a major role in Saturday night’s match, and he revealed after the show that he’s been dealing with a real-life injury in that same leg.
“It’s a very real injury that I have been dealing with,” Matt said. “It’s been a rough year for me. I come back after all that time off in the lockdown and the first thing I do is break my rib when I jumped out of the dugout. I dealt with that for a second. That sucked. Then, we did that Falls Count Anywhere’match between The Butcher & The Blade and I decided it would be a good idea to jump off the entrance set. Do a diving elbow off the entrance set, where is only concrete by the way, not a good idea. For a while I was walking around at home and having a hard time hobbling around. I thought I may have had a hairline fracture in my fibula or something. My amazing wife, who is also watching this, noticed that I was having a hard time getting around and she had Doctor Sampson order me an MRI just to see what was going on.
“Turns out, it wasn’t my fibula, it was actually soft tissue,” he continued. “It was the back of my knee, my MCL and after we looked at the MRI, I had a slight tear. Nothing at the time that needed surgery. The most interesting part was that I had found out about was the thinning of my ACL which they also considered a slight tear. I haven’t had any pain in my ACL, just wear and tear. I remember thinking back, ‘Have I ever hurt my ACL?’ I remember back in 2008, I banged up my knee and I had a hard time with it for a second. That’s the only time I can recall ever hurting my left knee in that area. So after talking to a couple of doctors we’re under the impression that the ACL (injury) may be a decade old or older.”
