Mick Foley: “AEW has that little bit of magic and WWE has kind of lost it”

I think when you’re part of a corporation and the bottom line is everything, you take away from your midcard by making it clear that what you’re selling is more important than the product in the ring.

I have a lot of young fans who weren’t even born when I was wrestling, and they’ll come up to me and talk to me about matches. Now, I can’t prove this, but I wonder if part of the reason younger audiences are drawn to matches from my era is because we called the matches.

Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler were locked in on the matches. There weren’t so many things they had to go to that would take people out of that suspension of disbelief.

That’s just a theory on my part, but I think 10 or 20 years down the line, the matches that JR called — whether it was with the King or whether it was with Jim Cornette in WCW — will stand the test of time better than the current matches in WWE.

It seems like the matches are a means to an end instead of something to be enjoyed for themselves.

So I just feel like, at this point, AEW has a personal ownership that shows in a way. There’s a love and a feeling of magic that I don’t think the corporate ownership of WWE displays nearly as well.”