AEW President Tony Khan recently shared the origin story of All Elite Wrestling, recalling how he first pitched the idea of a new wrestling league to the president of TBS and TNT in 2018. The company, which is celebrating its sixth anniversary of Dynamite this week, has grown into a major force in the wrestling industry, but its inception was the result of a significant gamble and Khan’s unwavering vision. His comments provide a fascinating look into the early days of AEW, detailing the steps he took to bring his dream of a new promotion to reality, starting with a chance encounter at a cocktail party in Los Angeles.
Speaking to Going Ringside, Khan explained how the idea first came about and his initial conversations with Warner Bros. Discovery executives.
“Well, I didn’t know those wrestlers, and I didn’t have that kind of connection to start this. When I launched it, I was in LA. I was at a cocktail party and I saw the president at the time of TBS and TNT, and I knew it, and I went up to him and said, ‘With the way wrestling TV rights are going, I think it would make a lot of sense for us to start a wrestling league.’ And I would put the shows on TBS and TNT. At the time, there was no wrestling on TBS or TNT, but there had been for many years. There’s a great history of wrestling from about 1971 to 2001 on TBS and from the mid-90s about 95 to 2001 on TNT. But neither network had hosted any wrestling for the — you know — for almost 20 years. When we started, and it was 2018 when I went to the president of TBS and TNT and said, ‘Let’s look at this,’ and he took it seriously.”
He then detailed the year of meetings and the “gamble” he took by signing wrestlers before a television deal was finalized.
“We had a lot of meetings. It was over a year before anything really happened, but it was a lot of meetings. And I started to realize there’s definitely a market for this. I began signing up the wrestlers. It was a major commitment, and it actually was a bit of a gamble because I started signing the wrestlers before I had the TV deal, because I could feel the TV deal was coming and that there was a market for what AEW was going to do. So, in January of 2019, we announced the launch of AEW. We announced that we had signed a bunch of star wrestlers. It was January 8th, like literally meters, like feet away from where I am right now in Jacksonville, right outside of my office, where it was actually the first ever AEW press conference.”
The official launch of AEW was announced in January 2019.
“We announced the launch of the promotion. We had a party with the fans, and we had a great celebration. We set off pyro in the parking lot, and we launched AEW and put eyes of the wrestling world here in Jacksonville. And then we went and took our opportunity, and we did the very first AEW event, Double or Nothing, in 2019. We set up with our very first episode of Wednesday Night Dynamite in October. Like I said, the six-year anniversary of the first Dynamite is actually this week, this Wednesday on TBS at 8:00.”
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