AEW Grand Slam: Ricochet discusses moving from WWE for 'change of scenery'
Ricochet during AEW Dynamite on Sept. 11, 2024. Credit: AEW/Lee South
Making your surprise All Elite Wrestling debut in front of 46,000 fans in London’s Wembley Stadium might be enough to rattle most pro wrestlers, but not Ricochet.
“Not to sound overly confident, but I was pretty sure I was going to get a pretty good reaction,” Ricochet said in a Newsday interview.
“As soon as you walk through the curtain, you kind of get in a different mindset. You kind of become a different person. And, all those feelings you were feeling before you walked through trying to dissipate into new feelings,” Ricochet added. “As soon as I walked through the curtain, it was just exciting. It was awesome. I was ready to go.”
Ricochet will have another chance to step into a stadium full of wrestling fans again when AEW returns to Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing for its fourth annual Grand Slam event, airing 8 p.m. Wednesday on TBS.
It will be Ricochet’s first time performing in New York since leaving WWE in June, following a six-year run with the company. Although Ricochet was largely featured in WWE’s mid-card, he believes he would have “made the transition into” the company’s main event scene if he stuck around longer.
Still, the former WWE Intercontinental and U.S. champion believes AEW “is the place that . . . Ricochet belongs.”
“I don't know if there's much more that I could do in the role that I was doing. I just needed a change of scenery,” Ricochet said of his decision to leave WWE, and join AEW, which was started just five years ago. “It felt like the place I wanted to be, the place that I just felt like would be more me. And, really, it has been since I came in. It's felt so easy and so smooth. So I feel like I made the right decision.”
Since Ricochet joined AEW, wrestling fans have been clamoring to watch “The Man Who Gravity Forgot” mix it up with the company's deep talent pool. But one match in particular has fans’ mouths watering — a rematch with Will Ospreay. In 2016, the two high-flyers competed against each other in an innovative New Japan Pro Wrestling match that some have credited with revolutionizing the industry.
“I feel like we just tried to go out there and give the best we could in the moment and the element that we were in. And the fact that it blew up so big, whether you loved it or hated it, I think it still gave wrestling a good subject to talk about and debate,” Ricochet said.
Even before Ricochet arrived in AEW, Ospreay was building anticipation for their long-awaited rematch, calling out his former foe on UK’s TalkSport radio in June.
“We did that match [in 2016] and went off on our separate journeys. Now we’re coming back together again. And for me, now, it’s like: ‘This is your chance now. This is your chance to show people,’” Ospreay said. “I honestly think he’s just been downplayed for so bloody long that people forgot the freak athlete that he is.”
Even eight years after the original, Ricochet said he believes a rematch with Ospreay would be as exciting as ever.
“We're wiser. We’re more experienced. Obviously, those things come into play,” he said. “But as far as stylistically, we still have the way we go about our matches.”
Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.
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