A few days before Fyter Fest, ITV Wrestling is offering a spotlight on 2 AEW wrestlers, courtesy of Road to Fyter Fest episodes. Darby Allin will make his All Elite Wrestling debut when he takes on Cody Rhodes on June 29, when The “Ring General”, and AEW Head of Talents Relations, Christopher Daniels will go one on one with CIMA. Both talked about their path and their opponents in candid interviews.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRD0medcQb8]
Jon Moxley is not the only wrestler who will make its debut at Fyter Fest, so is Darby Allin. In the video above, he explains, “it’s just that feeling of how quick life can just change. It is that feeling of how everything can get turned upside down.” When he was five, he was in the car his uncle was driving, he lost control of it. If his uncle died, Allin survived.
Allin says it’s not a gimmick, it’s just how he feels. “I paint my face because 50% of me is dead inside, the trust for humans, the respect for humans, it’s dead, that’s why I paint my face like I do.”
The “Relentless” tattoo on the back of my neck means, “never stop, keep moving forward. Allin confesses he’s severely depressed if he’s not doing something. “I want to be better than you were yesterday, be all that you can be, don’t settle for others expectations of you, others labels of you,” here’s what drives Darby Allin.
He’s decided to do these crazy stunts, like he was doing when he was a professional skateboarder. “I wanted an audience to experience my pain, I wanted an audience to see what I would go
through and what I’m willing to put myself through,” he adds. “The wrestling gave me that outlet.”
Whether in skateboarding or wrestling, Darby Allin wants people to accept his craziness. And they do. He just needed to find a place to fit in. Don’t ask him to slow down or be more safe, because scare is all he’s ever known. “I’ve always felt this relentless hunger to just get the most out of life because you never know when it’s gonna happen.” His ultimate goal at AEW is to be accepted for himself, what he’s ever wanted his whole life.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8avoR0zs6oY]
When Christopher Daniels and his So Cal Uncensored partners, Scorpio Sky and Kazarian, wrestled CIMA and his Strong Hearts partners at Double or Nothing, history was not in the making. It started a long time before, in 1999.
Daniels reminds, “I had my first long tour with Michinoku Pro Wrestling. They put me as Curry Man in a group with Cima. He had already had an established group called Crazy Max but Cima was the guy that sort of took me under his wing there and helped me learn the Japanese style and what they were expecting from me as an American wrestler there. Because of that, I felt like I got very comfortable very quickly and I felt like I had a lot more success than I would have had if I was on my own.”
Daniels thinks that wrestling for AEW is going to help Cima get noticed by more people in the Western world, “you have to be a really hardcore wrestling fan to know the name of Cima and know his legacy in pro wrestling.”
The match at Fyter Fest sounds like revenge for Cima, as Daniels notes. “He’s taking it upon himself to try and not just avenge the loss of Double or Nothing, but also to show the AEW fan base and to show the Western wrestling world that he’s a force to be reckoned with and he’s one of the best wrestlers in the world.”
Chris Daniels adds he’s been doing mostly six-man tags and tag team matches in the past couple of months. He asks himself if he can still perform by himself at that top level and “there’s no better opponent to test my skills against than someone like Cima.”
If you want to know even more about Excalibur, the masked member of AEW’s broadcast team, you can find the second part of an interview with the wrestling Legend here.
All pics and videos courtesy of AEW and ITV Wrestling