Just 48 hours after All Elite Wrestling’s first event, Double Or Nothing, the company’s name was brought up on WWE RAW by Sami Zayn.
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Zayn was taking part in an “electric chair” segment where the fans were able to ask him any questions that they wanted. At the end of the segment, Zayn mocked the crowd and the questions they did ask by saying that they could have asked him about anything, even AEW.
This caused the crowd to erupt into loud cheers and for Corey Graves, who was hosting the segment, to immediately change gears as Seth Rollins came out.
Every reply to this will be cody_ear.gif pic.twitter.com/yB44xVrbpl
— TDE Wrestling (@tde_wrestling) May 28, 2019
The question since last night has been whether Zayn’s AEW reference was scripted or an off-the-cuff remark. Reports are making the rounds on both sides of the argument.
Bryan Alvarez of F4Wonline expanded on his belief that the reference was unscripted by relaying a story that Vince McMahon was apparently furious backstage following the AEW reference on RAW.
“These are two facts about the situation, alright? There are absolutely people who insist that Sami was given the OK to mention AEW, alright?,” Alvarez said (via Wrestling Inc.). “I’ve even heard from one person who said that in the script that went around in the morning yesterday, it was in the script that he was going to mention AEW. One person said that. I had another person say, and Dave had people tell him that it was a scripted line. Now, with that said, I heard from multiple people, far more people in fact, and people that heard from other people, that all said, the line was not scripted, the line was not supposed to be said.
“I was also told from multiple people that when it happened, Vince flipped his lid. He was furious that this happened, OK? So, that’s literally… those are the two things that I can tell you. So, however you want to figure out what the hell is going on here, there’s various ways that you could explain this. The one that people seem to think is the most likely, is that a small number of people were told that he was given the OK, and that they’re working the boys and flipping out about it. I don’t know what the answer is, all I know is that some people were told that he was given the OK, but most people said that he wasn’t, and that Vince flipped out. I wasn’t there, I don’t know how the flip out occurred, I wasn’t there to witness it, but I do know that the people there who absolutely 100% believed that he was very angry, that this was not him putting on a show for people, that this was not him trying to work the boys, that he was angry when this got on the air. I don’t know how to explain everything, I just know that’s what happened last night.”
For the record, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer and Ryan Satin of Pro Wrestling Sheet have both stated the AEW line was part of the plan, while Alvarez of F4WOnline and Mike Johnson of PWInsider have claimed Zayn improvised it.
