AJ Styles recently appeared on The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling podcast to talk about his angle with Claire Lynch and the Hogan/Bischoff era. Here are the highlights.
On the botched and now infamous Claire Lynch Saga in TNA:
You’ve got to understand that it was going to be a great storyline and the little things that needed to be in the story to make it work weren’t. “Claire” had to be the niece of Dixie Carter, that was very important. Because why would AJ care? I would never stick my neck out for someone who was a family friend because what’s that got to do with me? Why would you just help them. Where if it was her (Dixie’s) niece that the key would be to keep her from bad publicity and I’ll make sure that no one knows about it. That was a big deal and also Claire had to be smoking hot. I mean unbelievably hot, to the point where you go “wow, if AJ did have sex with her I don’t blame him”. That’s what we needed to have but it was quite the opposite. So it was the little things that destroyed that momentum that we had and people thought I may be with Dixie and it was a great thing and we had all that momentum and “this Claire” comes out and screws it all up.
How he approached the Hogan/Bischoff ERA in TNA and his reaction to Hulk Hogan’s lack of enthusiasm to promote TNA on outside media appearances:
“First of all, I just tried to stay positive. Pretty much anything Hulk Hogan touched at least at the beginning turned to gold. But it didn’t obviously because I don’t think he knew the roster that was in front of him and that was the problem. The names, the people who were the “brand names” of TNA that they had no idea who they were. If they didn’t know who they were they just did whatever they wanted with it. They wanted me to dye my hair blonde and be ‘Little Ric’ and just because they didn’t know me. Instead of being Ric Flair I needed to be AJ Styles with Ric Flair. Being with Ric I’ll hopefully get the rub from Ric there is no doubt about that and Fortune could have been great but they broke up Fortune a little bit too early and we were really getting some steam and they broke us up and noting came about it. It was things like that that got weird and Hogan seemed like he didn’t have much to do with TNA and seemed like he was embarrassed of the show because he never said anything about TNA at all. Even when he was on shows he just never mentioned it. I believe that he was ashamed of what was on TV. I believe if TNA were doing a lot better he would have been a lot more gung-ho about saying a lot more about it but he didn’t say a word and it bothered me but thinking back I understand it now.”
You can download the episode by clicking here.
