The Young Bucks Detail Their First Meeting With Tony Khan
They were initially sceptical...
Nov 25, 2020
The Young Bucks have been doing the media rounds to promote their new book Young Bucks: Killing the Business from Backyards to the Big Leagues and they recently sat down for an interview with Alex McCarthy of talkSPORT.
During the chat, The Bucks detailed their first meeting with Tony Khan and noted they were both initially sceptical about meeting him.
Nick said: "What's funny is he tried contacting us both at first and I no-sold it because I had heard this story before. I was like, 'Ah, I don't believe it' [laughs]. Luckily, thank god, Matt picked up the phone and talked to him. After one conversation, Matt and I, we were still sceptical a little bit, but the way he had talked to Matt, Matt was like, 'I think he knows what he's talking about' and it opened our eyes.
"The relationship got further and I remember meeting him for the first time in London at York Hall for a Ring of Honor show. He was in the balcony and little did Ring of Honor know that we were going to meet him [laughs].
"He picked us up in a limousine right after that and took us to the stadium his team plays at and we pretty much talked from there, things started snowballing and we pretty much knew it was serious when we were at his stadium and he's telling us, 'Maybe we can fill this thing up one day!'"
Matt added: "Even then, though, I was so protective of our brand because we had done so much at that point and we'd just done the All In show. So it was still scary to just hand over the keys to someone else and that was probably the biggest reason we didn't go to WWE at the time because it was like, 'What are they going to do with this?' We were almost over-protective of what we created. So yeah, meeting this new guy, Tony, was like this guy seems great, but again, we're just meeting him for the first time and he's saying all the right things, but there's still a trepidation.
"Because we'd been doing this for so long and had struggled for so long and finally we're finding this success, is now the time to finally hand it over to someone? But he didn't want to do that, he wanted us to keep being ourselves because that's what brought us to the dance. When we heard that, it was reassuring to us.
"He's a wrestling fan and to this day, he probably loves wrestling more than anyone I've ever met. And he knows more about wrestling than anyone I've ever met.
"It didn’t happen overnight, it took a lot of conversation, speaking to him every day and meeting his dad - which we talk about in the book as well - and realising one, I think this is real and two, I think this is someone I'm comfortable working with on an everyday basis."