Swerve Strickland credits Dustin Rhodes: ‘The guy behind a lot of my great matches’
Swerve Strickland gave credit to Dustin Rhodes during a recent interview as being the guy behind a lot of his matches.
Strickland appeared on the Bootleg Kev podcast ahead of AEW Revolution last weekend in Los Angeles. During the interview, he said that Rhodes often provides suggestions for his matches and offers a perspective that Strickland finds inspiring.
“Dustin, in general, he’s been the guy behind a lot of my great matches,” Strickland said. “He doesn’t tell me what to do, but he suggests things and where they should go. And he always puts a perspective on it where I’m like, ‘Oh, now you got me really thinking.’ And then I’m like, ‘How would you do it?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I would go this way with it,’ but he never tells me what to do.”
Strickland also addressed rapper Travis Scott giving Dustin’s younger brother, Cody Rhodes, a busted eardrum at Elimination Chamber earlier this month. Strickland himself suffered a busted eardrum during his match with Hangman Page at Revolution.
Regarding Scott, Strickland said, “That’s a very excited artist who finally got to do his dream.”
Strickland continued, saying that he knows Scott has been training with Booker T but thinks he got overly excited being in a segment with The Rock, John Cena, and Cody Rhodes.
“That’s a lot of excitement, that’s a lot of pressure, and that’s what happens when you get excited with someone who’s not in our industry.”
“Sometimes you want just the natural reaction from other people outside of wrestling. You want them to just be natural, just flow, and feel, because then it’ll feel real. But sometimes that stuff happens, and it’s like, ‘Ah, too far.’”
Strickland signed a new deal with AEW last year, with our own Dave Meltzer reporting that it keeps him under contract until September 2029. Strickland confirmed the length of the deal and said there is nowhere else he wants to be.
“Yep, there’s nowhere else I would rather be,” he said. “A lot of people say like, ‘Oh, that’s just PR, he’s supposed to say that.’ No, I mean that from the bottom of my heart, there’s no other place I’d rather be.”
“Do I have bad days as opposed to good days? Of course. This is a job. I have frustrations here and there, but I work through those frustrations better here than I did in other places anywhere else in the world. Whether it be Lucha Underground, MLW, WWE, NXT, I’ve found Tony Khan and I have always worked through frustrations.”
Strickland’s full appearance on the podcast is available below.
Ian Carey is a writer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, whose work has been featured in NOW Magazine, The Huffington Post, and more. A lifelong wrestling aficionado born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he has covered the industry for a decade and a half. He joined the f4wonline.com team in 2019.