All Elite Wrestling brings Dynamite and Rampage to the Entertainment and Sports Arena on Wednesday night, and one of the athletes you’ll see in action was in our studios Tuesday, as two-time AEW International Champion Orange Cassidy stopped by to chat with Rooster & Doc!
First up for Orange is a six-man tag team match tomorrow, where he will team with Jay White and Hangman Page to face AEW Champion Jon Moxley, Wheeler Yuta, and Pac – and it’s an interesting dynamic because he and his partners are facing Moxley for the title in a four-way match at the next pay-per-view event later this month.
“I let all the other people in the match do all the work and I stand there, so the more the merrier I say,” Cassidy said. “Every time I step in the ring with Jon Moxley, somebody gets bloodied or stabbed in the head with a fork or piledriven through a table, so you never know what's gonna happen. I just expect the unexpected.”
And then comes World’s End, where he’ll have a chance to become the AEW Champion – a height even he never dreamed of reaching when Orange Cassidy became a thing.
“I never thought about this; everything that's happening, I know people talk about this stuff where you gotta get like a vision board or imagine it, but I went through the mentality throughout my entire life of what's in front of me, what do I need to do to get the job done, and then on to the next one,” Cassidy said. “I think hard work and commitment is the thing that successful people will tell you is the key; I don't sit around and wish for things to happen, I go and make them happen. I mean, I wear denim and put my hands in my pockets and I didn't think people would care about this, it was just doing something that I liked. But I’m not the same wrestler I was five years ago when AEW started, and I think what AEW does better than anybody is allow us as professional wrestlers to grow and change and evolve and develop, and they embrace that.”
Whatever comes of this week, or World's End, or the future, though, you know that when you're watching Orange Cassidy, the juice is worth the squeeze for him.
“I make the professional wrestling I like, and it’s just about getting the best possible reaction and evoking emotion, whether it's sadness or happiness, from the person watching, because it's unlike any other form of entertainment,” Cassidy said. “You can't go to a movie theater and start yelling at Iron Man to get up and watch out behind you, but in professional wrestling, when you're there in the crowd and you chant and you say, ‘come on, Orange, get up,’ I'm like, ‘okay!’ It gives you a little boost, and having an arena full of people cheering, it gives you that extra little bit that you need to finish. There are times I'm beat up, bloodied, sore, out of breath, and the people give you that a little adrenaline boost that you need to get it done. There’s nothing like it.”
Take a listen to Cassidy’s entire visit with Rooster & Doc about AEW and his career!