Kyle Fletcher reveals his AEW dream match, big-picture goal
Kyle Fletcher has already gotten to face a lot of his dream opponents, but a match against Samoa Joe remains on his bucket list.
While appearing on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Fletcher named Joe as the one opponent he really wants to face. Fletcher said he’s been watching Joe for a long time and would love to test himself against him.
“I think the one that I keep talking about is: I really want to get in there with Samoa Joe,” Fletcher said. “I think that would be a really cool one for me and a really cool test for me. It’s someone that I’ve been watching for a decade-plus.
“So that’s someone that I would love to get in there with. Other than that, I’ve been pretty blessed. Like, I’ve been lucky enough to get in there with a lot of the people that I looked up to growing up. So I don’t know if there’s a lot of people left, man. It’s pretty cool.”
Joe is the current AEW World Champion after defeating Hangman Page for the title last month at Full Gear. It’s Joe’s second reign with the belt.
At 26 years old, Fletcher has already held the TNT Championship once. He re-signed with AEW earlier this year and has the big-picture goal of becoming the greatest of all time. Fletcher knows it’s a huge goal, but he’s someone who always wants to be striving for something.
With material goals like winning championships, Fletcher has always felt a bit empty after achieving them. He can’t fully define what being the “greatest of all time” means to him. But Fletcher wants to feel like, whenever his time in the ring has done, he has fully reached his potential.
“I think to me, it means when I’m done, when I’ve wrapped it up, I want to believe in my heart that I reached my fullest potential. I think I have hopefully a lot of potential still to come, a lot of things, a lot of goals that I want to achieve. And I think, yeah, when I’m all said and done, I want to feel like I did everything I could,” Fletcher said.
“I want to be spoken about for years after I’m done, years after I’m not on this earth anymore. I want to be spoken about in that best-of-all-time conversation. And that’s kind of, it’s not something that is tangible. It’s not something that is something that I can get to a certain point and be like, ‘All right, I’m done it now.’ It’s something that I’ll always be working towards, which I think is what I want.”
Joseph Currier is the lead editor of F4WOnline.com, directing daily news coverage and writing articles on professional wrestling. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, obtaining a journalism degree in 2016. Joseph joined F4W during his time at UMass and has now been writing about the industry for nearly a decade.
In addition to his work with F4W, Joseph has previously contributed to Sports Illustrated's wrestling coverage. He lives in Massachusetts and is a diehard fan of the Boston sports teams and Liverpool Football Club.