Excalibur On His Mask, AEW Commentary And More
Photo Credit: Thomas Tischio / AEW
Excalibur recently appeared on the Chris Van Vliet Show and discussed several topics, ranging from his mask to his work for All Elite Wrestling and more. Here are some highlights.
On doing commentary for AEW:
Excalibur: “I would say it’s a dream come true but my father-in-law asked at Christmas, ‘So is this your dream job?’ And I said, ‘Well, technically no, because I never dreamt that a job like this could exist.’ Yes, it is my dream job, but no, it’s not because I would have never dreamt about doing this. You know, for the longest time, it was WWE or nothing. So yeah, it’s been awesome.
On his mask:
Excalibur: “It may shock people to learn that I used to wrestle professionally. I started in Southern California, where there is s a big lucha libre tradition, you know, just being north of Mexico and lucha libre being the Mexican style of wrestling. And masks are very prevalent, not only in lucha libre but in all facets of Mexican culture, it’s part of their cultural mythology, basically. And so I took a shine to lucha for two reasons. One, because growing up I was a huge comic book fan and so there was the superhero-esque aspect of it. And two, I just liked the athleticism of lucha and that style of wrestling more than what was kind of happening in the mid-90s in WWF or WCW at the time. And so that led me down a road where then I discovered the Japanese version of lucha, where all these wrestlers would come over from Japan and they were usually junior heavyweight style wrestlers and they would usually come over from Japan, train in Mexico and then go back to Japan. And they started their own promotion, called Universal Pro Wrestling. It was Gran Yimata, was the one that started it and that promotion had very early incarnations of the Great Sasuke, Super Delfin, Taka Michinoku, Gedo, Jado, Ultimo Dragon, you know, all these guys who would go on to be some of the greatest junior heavyweights, and so when I saw that, and I was like, oh my God, that’s even better than lucha because it’s taking some of the harder hitting aspects of the Japanse style, marrying it with that athleticism and that really is my sweet spot for professional wrestling.”
“This style of mask has always been what I’ve had since 1999.”
On why he transitioned from wrestling to doing commentary:
Excalibur: “It was kind of by necessity because in 2003, some friends and I started a promotion called Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, PWG, and we realized that selling tapes and DVDs at the time was necessary to have the business be successful. And so the first show we realized without commentary, but it just kind of felt weird, so we went back and recorded our own commentary, it was myself and Disco Machine. And we just did commentary for the show and it was very tongue-in-cheek, it wasn’t good. If I listened to it today, I’d just want to tear my ears off. But that was the roots of it and throughout the years, we didn’t have the budget to bring anybody to do commentary. And so we just did it. Everything about PWG is very DIY, very bootstrappy, and so from tip to tail, it was all done internally, including the commentary. And so throughout the years, the repetition of doing that allowed me to develop and as we started going on for longer, I kind of realized, like ‘Oh, we have the best legit wrestling in the world. I need to be more serious about my job and commentary to do these guys the best job possible. Because if they’re doing all out in the ring and I’m just sitting here making jokes, that kind of undercuts the importance of what they’re doing. And so I started taking it a little more seriously.”
The full episode is available below:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1zpiVFsHv9QVUJeNIKzNce
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