Tony Khan On AEW: ‘ I Never Considered Us An Essential Business’

Tony Khan and All Elite Wrestling are set to return to live television tonight. This will be the first time the company will reconvene since the stay-at-home orders were put in place. They had filmed multiple weeks of Dynamite in Georgia before shutting down.

Now, Khan has revealed that he never considered AEW to be an essential business. On a recent episode of AEW Unrestricted, Khan went over his thought process behind continuing Dynamite and not releasing any talent. Here is the quote, courtesy of Fightful:

“I knew there was a good chance the Rochester and Newark shows were not going to come off. We had to pivot and re-think these things. What was hard for me was, I didn’t want to force anybody to come to work under these circumstances. When we were in Salt Lake City, I told everybody ‘this is totally voluntary from here on out.’

I didn’t know where we were gonna be the next week; Rochester or Jacksonville, but I had to figure it out by the next morning because the trucks needed to know where to take the ring and set. That night, I knew we were gonna have to make changes. I talked to [TNT] and they were excited for us to keep putting on shows. In Salt Lake City, I said it was a voluntary enterprise and I’m glad because some people have taken me up on it. The last thing I want is someone to feel uncomfortable in the work environment,”

“I first had an inkling that things were going to be shutdown going into the third show, which is when we taped all these shows. States were starting to shut down and I never considered us or tried to force us to be ‘an essential business.’ I never tried to stay open against restrictions. When we heard Florida and Georgia were going to shut down, we would shut down too and we needed to tape as much content as we could before the shutdown,”

“Something I put an emphasis on during the shutdown is that we haven’t let anybody go and we’ve tried to take care of everybody through this. It’s not the right time for re-organizing or re-structuring for us. I want to take care of everybody and make sure they’re comfortable.”

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