Kenny Omega is a living legend and is one of the, if not the best wrestler in the world right now. WWE has been trying to get him to sign with them for a while now, especially after he’s had so many fantastic matches to his name. But it seems that AJ Styles should be thanked for all this.
On the Cruise of Jericho, an episode of Talk Is Jericho was recorded, where Kenny Omega revealed how he was going to quit professional wrestling for MMA but AJ Styles changed that. This is what he said:
“Yeah I mean of course we did multiple tags together and a lot of people don’t know but I have had one singles match with AJ and I actually credit that match to keeping him in the wrestling business. I was sort of at a crossroads (no pun intended) and I wasn’t sure… this was in 2006 I believe and I wasn’t sure if I was sure if I was going to do the MMA thing or I was going to do professional wrestling.”
“I was competing in jiu-jitsu all around the country and I was sort of training in exhibitions and sparring matches to do actual full-contact MMA and it was enjoyable but I found that my in-ring performance was suffering because you know there’s an aesthetic look you have to maintain in professional wrestling. If I’m cutting 20 pounds for a tournament or a fight and then I have to go to the ring I’m going to look like I came out of a dryer and it just didn’t jive. So if I was going to concentrate on one, the other was going to suffer.”
“So I wanted to use that AJ match in Winnipeg to sort of determining what does my future hold for me? Am I going to go into fighting or am I going to do the wrestling thing? And after that AJ match when I thought, ‘Oh my goodness there’s this guy who’s so much better than me but we have this chemistry together.’ It kind of showed me my true potential and maybe something that I could grasp and something I could achieve that I hadn’t seen yet.”
“It really made me look in the mirror and say to myself: ‘Jeez, even when I do these all-time jiu-jitsu tournaments I’m always going for a finish, I’m always trying to have that exciting match when really you should just be concentrating on getting that gold medal or whatever. So I found that I was actually an entertainer, I was a performer. So I was going to give this wrestling thing one more shot. So after my 1 tour which was possibly going to be my retirement tour in America, things really took off after that and then came my first tour with PWG where I met the Young Bucks or at least half the Young Bucks and soon thereafter I was in Japan.”
We are glad that he decided to stick with pro wrestling, and I’m sure everyone in the wrestling world is as well.
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h/t to Ringside News for the transcription.
