William Regal comments on his brief AEW run to this point have been brief, and gracious — both to the company, its owner, and the people he shared the screen with on Dynamite and Rampage.
But in a new interview, Regal says he didn’t sign with Tony Khan to be on television. He doesn’t detail what he thought he’d be doing, but considering his role at WWE before and after spending most of 2022 in AEW, you have to imagine it had something to do with coaching and developmental.
Whatever it was, Regal spent most of his time working with Bryan Danielson, Dean Ambrose & Wheeler Yuta in Blackpool Combat Club. He spent time portraying a coach, but he told Scroobius Pip of the Distraction Pieces Podcast the job he signed on for “never transpired”.
“There’s a lot that happened this year, there’s also a lot of things that have made me go, ‘I’m quite happy being not in the limelight,’ and I have been for many years. I had my time.
“The last little few months in AEW was getting far too much about me and it should have been about the talent that I was with, not about me. I’m quite happy being in the background...
“I couldn’t have a better last few months as far as TV and doing that but I didn’t go there with that intention. The intention was to do something different and it just never...it started off the way it did but I didn’t expect it to end up being this thing that it was for the last several months where I just became talent.
“I went there with a different plan because I was asked to go there to help out in a different capacity and that never transpired.”
Regal is back in WWE as Vice President, Global Talent Development. Whether that works out for him in the long run remains to be seen, but it seems clear AEW wasn’t what he hoped it would be either way.
Where this quote factors that into the ongoing debate about how proactive members of the AEW roster are in seeking out coaching and how receptive they are to it when offered? That’s up to you.
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