Swerve Strickland explains why “it wasn’t easy at all” to cut his promos against Adam Page for AEW WrestleDream

During an appearance on the Under the Ring podcast, Swerve Strickland addressed the difficulty of his in-ring promo segments with “Hangman” Adam Page leading up to the 2023 AEW WrestleDream PPV event…

“It wasn’t easy at all. For me, I feel like the toughest part of this industry is being able to just speak, you know, like speak, like, in a believable way. Speak in a way that’s original. Speak in a way that is not so cliche and formulaic that you’ve heard a million times that you can see a lot of where the conversations are going before they even start, like a mile away. That’s so hard, especially when some of the greatest talkers of all time have already come and gone and are either already out of the industry, or they’re on their way out of the industry.

To find your own voice is tough, and for me, this is the most mic time I’ve ever gotten in my career, like on live TV, I would say. You know, like I had like the mic a couple times in WWE and NXT, but that was a lot of shared mic time, but with AEW, this was like, like six minutes straight of talking and telling a story and building this hype and building this energy and like being original, like trying to find my voice and then like present it to someone who’s done this time and time again, there has been some of the greatest has ever stepped foot in this ring from this business. You know, like that’s, that’s a lot of pressure, so it can be a little scary at times, but it’s like that’s where you got to level up. That’s where I had to level up. I had to become something. I had to become someone and make a statement to make a point and then like, oh, man, okay, I got it. Now do it again. Oh, okay, now I gotta find that energy again and really find out who you really are and you gotta do it all over again. You got to make sure not only to top it, but make sure you still keep who you were the first time.”