Originally published at Lance Archer: Cody Rhodes, Chris Jericho & QT Marshall were big proponents in having me join AEW
Archer speaks about his venture into AEW and shares who he’d like to team with.
Dating back to February 2020, Lance Archer has been signed to All Elite Wrestling. Perched On The Top Rope welcomed Archer onto their show and they dove into how Archer got into the company.
He shared that Cody Rhodes, Q.T. Marshall and Chris Jericho were big proponents of his and those endorsements played a key role in him getting signed.
In the very earliest stages, Cody (Rhodes) was very big on helping me become part of AEW. I had conversations with him and them in Texas because they came to Texas in late 2019. Went down to Corpus Christi and had a meeting with him and Q.T. Marshall and that’s where kind of the springboard to me joining AEW started and I’d been with New Japan for around nine years at this point. Had only been working on a tour-by-tour basis because it’s the style of business that New Japan did and then they randomly, finally offered a full-time contract but then so did AEW but the only reason AEW had an opportunity to do so was because New Japan had never actually signed me to a full-time contract and like I said, Cody and Q.T. were big proponents in having me join AEW and then obviously, Tony (Khan) had to sign off on it and all that stuff but at that point, I really hadn’t had any conversations with Tony other than very short ones and stuff like that. I’d always had good conversations with Chris Jericho. He was a big proponent in having me join AEW as well. So I had a lot of good people on my side in the early stages. This was obviously late 2019, early 2020 before the world shut down. But, it ended up being a good situation.
When asked who in AEW would he like to team with, Archer named-dropped Wardlow. He feels the dynamic of him and Wardlow versus FTR (Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler) could be intriguing.
He’s been on his own path. I think it would still be a fun visual if you saw Wardog, Wardlow and The Murderhawk Monster Lance Archer as a massive, meaty team just going in there and going toe-to-toe with FTR because FTR’s not afraid to step up to anyone at any time no matter how big or small they are, and we’re two big, bad behemoths that I think if you just paired us together, visually, would just be a fun site to see for the fans and then his ability, my ability, FTR’s ability, I think we could absolutely deliver some classics. Just hard hitting, holy s— moments in tag team wrestling.
In addition to his work with AEW, Archer continues to compete for New Japan Pro-Wrestling. He is scheduled for Fighting Spirit Unleashed on October 28th.
Archer and Alex Zayne are going to be challenging El Phantasmo and Hikuleo for the NJPW STRONG Openweight Tag Team Championships.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Perched On The Top Rope with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.