Swerve Strickland: 'I want to be part of AEW's history and take it to different heights' (2024)

Swerve Strickland is days away from possibly making All Elite Wrestling (AEW) history by becoming the company’s first Black world champion.

Strickland will challenge for the AEW World Championship when he takes on ‘Hangman’ Adam Page and champion Samoa Joe at Sunday’s AEW Revolution pay-per-view event. If Strickland takes that belt, it would represent a historic step at an early stage for a wrestling company.

WWE took until 1998 — 45 years after it was founded as the Capitol Wrestling Corporation — to crown a Black world champion. World Championship Wrestling crowned a Black world champion in 1992, four years after the company was founded — but its belt had a lineage dating back to 1948.

AEW, by contrast, is only five years old.

“It would be change. It would be culture. It’s impact, and it’s history,” Strickland told The Athletic. “For AEW to get their first African American champion only five years into its existence would be big. Other companies took years to pull this off. I came over in 2022, and unlike a lot of people who carry the weight of where they’ve come from, I was like, ‘No, I’m gonna wipe the slate clean, start fresh’. I started from literally zero.

“Getting to this point in just two years shows what (AEW owner and general manager) Tony Khan sees in me. I want to be part of AEW’s history and take it to different heights.”

Strickland is excited by the idea of having such a history-making role.

He continued: “I want to come to Wembley Stadium this year (AEW will hold their second annual All In event at the stadium in August) as the world champion, as an African American in another country and fill 80,000 seats.

“Speaking about the possibility of pulling that off, it gives me goosebumps. It’s hard not to be excited about this kind of thing.”

Strickland, who joined AEW after two years with the WWE, rides into Sunday on a wave. He has — on-screen — kidnapped veteran wrestlers and broken their fingers, turned on his tag team partner Keith Lee, smashing him with a cinder block, and stood menacingly over Page’s young son’s crib. But aided by his dancing manager Prince Nana, the all-business Strickland has become a serious fan favourite.

Swerve stomps a DAMN CINDER BLOCK through Keith Lee

@ AEW Dynamite 12.21.2022 pic.twitter.com/EHIpjFSaGg

— 𝙰𝚢𝚘'𝚜 𝚆𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙲𝚕𝚒𝚙𝚜💾 (@ayowrestleclips) December 22, 2022

Despite his ostensibly villainous actions, Strickland is not surprised that he is connecting with the crowds.

“There are, like, four different layers of Swerve that people get to witness,” he said. “If you don’t resonate with Swerve the mogul, the artist, the rapper, then you’re going to resonate with the filmmaker. If not the filmmaker, you will resonate with the in-ring competitor. If not the in-ring competitor, the faction leader of the Mogul Embassy.

“By showcasing myself every week, people have gravitated and started recognising what I’m made of. It intrigues people, and people understand what I’m fighting for.”

Khan, who, as AEW’s booker, plans out Strickland’s on-screen actions, admitted that the star’s rise has not come as a shock to him.

“After his first match against Tony Neese on AEW Rampage, Chris Jericho walked back to me and said, ‘This guy is really amazing. Where did you find him?’,” he told The Athletic. I’ve been watching him for years. I wanted to bring him into AEW when we first launched, but he had just been signed by WWE.

“Swerve is a wildcard. We saw that Swerve is a breakout star. He won the tag team championship in his first year and went on to have a massive 2023 while being showcased as a singles star. The idea was to showcase Swerve in feature positions with the intent and belief that crowds all over the world would buy into him. I believed he’d become very popular.”

Strickland thinks his connection has been aided by a childhood that saw him move across the world because of his dad’s career in the United States Army. Strickland lived in Germany for seven years before returning to the United States. While there, he went to several different schools — “inner-city, public, private and tech” — with different student bodies.

“When I got into wrestling, I opened my ear and my mind to different cultures, sounds, music, media, art and philosophies. It helped me grow into a multifaceted person, and also to being open. All of those things made me, me. I’m not just one thing — Swerve has never been just one thing.”

Part of the way Strickland has used his multifaceted cultural tastes has been by introducing horror — and not in the traditional monstrous sense — to the wrestling ring. He believes the definition of horror goes far beyond what people think of when they hear iconic names like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers.

“That’s not, to me, what horror is. Horror is the actual fear of what could happen,” he said. “It’s being put in uncomfortable positions and you can’t do anything about it, and you just have to sit there and watch. Like the home invasion … I can freely move around and put my hands on things. I can make it real. I can get close to your infant child in a crib, and there’s nothing (Page) can do as a father. As a human, that is horrifying.

“It wasn’t a physical thing. It wasn’t loud. It was quiet and controlled and very slow and subtle.”

Strickland is also looking forward to facing an in-ring veteran in Samoa Joe, who he said was a formative part of his studies when he was first learning to become a professional wrestler.

“He’s a true pioneer in this business, and he holds so much intimidation,” Strickland said of Joe. “There’s so much of an aura about him that he has always had, and he has found a way to fine-tune it in so many ways.

“Joe has once again revitalised his career, found another way to reshape it. Just being in the ring doing promos (talking sections of wrestling shows) alone is surreal. People are buying into it from a promo standpoint; now people are anticipating us getting to the physical aspect.

“It means the world to me, and reaching Joe in a pay-per-view sense shows my growth. Getting to him means I’ve grown.”

(Top photo: AEW)

Amitai Winehouse is a Senior Editor for The Athletic, based in London. He previously worked at the Daily Mail, Telegraph and the Yorkshire Evening Post and was shortlisted for the SJA Young Sportswriter of the Year in 2018. Follow Amitai on Twitter @awinehouse1