William Regal was a recent guest on AEW’s Unrestricted podcast where he reflected on his AEW debut.
Regal admitted the situation came around fast, and he was originally not planning to do anything for an entire year. Regal also revealed that he was the man to come up with the name, Daniel Bryan.
“Very quicky,” he said on his AEW debut coming together. “I was checked out. As you get older, and you hear all these things when you’re younger right, about how, ‘time flies when you get older.’ It may only have been a couple of months, but once I was no longer needed in my former line of work, I had done nothing but do this for a living since I was 16 full-time, apart from a couple of years off with different things that go on health-wise, and a few injuries, I have had nothing but wrestling.
“So I just was, ‘that’s it, I’ve had a great run. I am going to take at least a year off, except for I was thinking about this time I’d start looking for the odd thing in the UK. Just so I can go and see my family, and go home for a bit.’ Then I get a call off Daniel Bryan, Bryan Danielson. The reason I can say that is because I came up with Daniel Bryan, that was my idea. But it sounded very exciting. Just to go back and be talent, basically.”
William Regal also admitted he still doesn’t know what he is actually doing in AEW. He also spoke about how he is learning that it is not his job to do certain things anymore.
“I still don’t know what I am doing there,” he said. “I am like, ‘I can’t believe this is working out.’ It’s organically turned into what this incredible opportunity is. But also, I am 53, but I am walking into a new company, I have just come from another company, and I am trying to watch everything and see all this young talent, and my brain is going. But you don’t have to do that anymore, that’s not your job, but I still can’t help it.”
Regal believes that his wrestling brain has not actually caught up with him yet because of how checked out he was from the business following the end of his WWE run.
“When I say I checked out of wrestling, I checked out of wrestling. My wrestling brain hasn’t caught up yet,” Regal stated. “I felt comfortable last week. But I don’t think my wrestling brain is in full working order yet. Where I can just go, ‘boom, boom, boom.’ It’s not my job either. But the first few weeks was just go out and do my bit and just watch.”
Jon Moxley is a talent that William Regal has been working with in AEW as part of the Blackpool Combat Club. Regal shared a story about the BCC member from his time in FCW when he handpicked Moxley to deliver a promo, which was on his first day in a new role with WWE at the time.
“He was just sat in the corner in a denim jacket, just sat there the way he is. Firstly, he just walked slowly through the crowd and walked in the ring. I am thinking, because it’s my first day doing this, ‘I hope he’s as good as I’ve seen him be,’ number one. He had a one-minute promo and he started talking, and within 10 seconds I thought, ‘thank goodness for that, he’s as good as I thought he was.’
“In 20 seconds, I have a thing where I can just scan everything, and I am looking round, and everybody in the place was like that. It had crushed everybody’s spirits because whatever they had just done, this had gone out of the water. I looked at Triple H, and he just looked at me, and he went, meaning he had got goosebumps.”
