Long before he was “The Last of a Dying Breed” and a star on All Elite Wrestling’s roster, Eddie Kingston was just a kid in the Y-O – Yonkers, New York – and a childhood friend of our Pete Hoffman.
So, when King joined Hoff on the latest episode of The Fight Fan, he of course explained how a kid
“I know everyone loses contact with old friends, but I got out of high school and I was at my job, and I saw a bunch of older guys who shouldn’t be working but had to…and I said there has to be something more than this,” Kingston said. “I always wanted to be a wrestler, so I looked up schools, went to Chikara, and that’s where everything took off in PA.”
It’ll be 20 years in October since Kingston, who turns 40 in December, has been a star of the squared circle, and he still pinches himself daily.
“When I talk to guys like Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard, it’s a trip; I never would’ve thought I’d get that chance,” he said. “I’ve known a lot of the guys in the AEW locker room since we first started, so I felt like I belonged right away.”
And, like many who ignored the “don’t try this at home” messages on TV, you might think Kingston maybe had a leg up in his training – as Hoff knows well, having been one of Kingston’s victims in the rigors of wrestling in the back yard – but that wasn’t the case.
“It wasn’t easy because you have to learn the right way to do things – when you’re in the yard, it’s different,” Kingston laughed. “I throw you and hopefully you don’t break nothing, because I don’t want your mother to yell at me or call my mother! So to me, it was hard to learn all that, because I wasn’t interested in the moves, I was interested in why we do things, the story aspect of it – but through the years, you have to learn how to do things without killing anybody. And now, this is just me at 17 turned up a million notches.”
AEW’s weekly program, Dynamite, is airing a special Friday episode, which leads into their “Double or Nothing” pay-per-view event on Sunday night. In the main event, Kingston will team with long-time friend Jon Moxley to challenge the Young Bucks for the AEW Tag Team Championship.
"I'll be honest with you - I'm gonna f those boys up," Kingston said of the Bucks. "I like them, but I'm gonna show them something different. I know I can fight and hit hard and take shots, so I'm going to mess them up. Win or lose, they're gonna feel it."
There's a catch, though: it will be the first AEW event with a full crowd in almost 16 months. That may be a shock to some, but Kingston is ready, because he has always been focused even with a smaller (or absent) crowd over the last year.
“I always try to talk to the people at home watching, and try to fight for the people at home, so I was able to keep things going (without fans),” Kingston said. “I’m a little anxious for the live crowd because it’s the first time in a long time. I may get a little crazier with the fans back, but let me flow, and I’ll ask for forgiveness later!”
AEW, which was formed officially on New Year’s Day 2019, will celebrate its technical second anniversary with Double or Nothing, as the first event in that chronology on May 25, 2019, was the first “official” event for the promotion.
In those two years, the fledgling promotion has produced numerous PPV events, landed its flagship show Dynamite on TNT (and soon to be TBS) and produced AEW Dark on YouTube, and will be adding a second program on the Turner networks this fall. There’s no true “war” with WWE like the WCW Monday Night Wars of the 1990s, as AEW’s shows air on different nights than WWE’s, but what the promotion backed by Jaguars owner Shahid Khan and his son, AEW CEO Tony Khan, is trying to do is provide an alternative featuring former WWE stars mixed in with international stars and the next generation of up-and-comers who may not “fit in” with the global giants.
“We’re trying to change this up,” Kingston said. “I’ve known the Bucks for years, and they’ve always had the outlaw spirit like me and Mox. We want to do things our way, where guys like me might not have been looked at in the past because we’re not conventional; I don’t have six-pack abs, I’m me. I go to the gym, I do Muay Thai, and just because we may not look like what a 75-year-old man may think we should look like, it doesn’t mean we’re not athletes. We’ve seen a lot of jacked-up dudes who, when you smack them in the face, they can’t take it. You can’t judge a book by its cover, and that’s what AEW is.”
That 75-year-old man, you may have figured out, is WWE Chairman Vince McMahon – but even though Kingston has never been in a WWE locker room, he won’t knock what the competition does, because he wants them to succeed just as much as AEW.
“I want the competition to do well, because when WWE does well, when the independents do well, AEW does well,” Kingston said. “It starts at the top, and we all have to do well.”
So how long will the soon-to-be 40-year-old continue to ply his trade in the ring?
“Now that I’m making a little bit of money and can go see doctors and bought myself a portable sauna and ice bath, I’d say another 10 years,” he said.
Kingston also dished on the underwhelming ending of Moxley’s exploding ring match earlier this year and how he had to mentally prepare for what was meant to happen, athletes crossing over to wrestling, his New York Sports fandom and some thoughts on UFC – listen below, starting at approximately 3:45 of the latest episode of The Fight Fan! *WARNING: Graphic language in the podcast
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