Quoted By:
>On Mercedes making her NJPW debut: “Good for her. She really bet on herself, and it’s hard for me not to appreciate that because I’m one of those guys too where I feel like Vince always knew that. I didn’t have to be in WWE. I’m not afraid to step out of Alexandria, a safe zone. I kind of compare Alexandria of the Walking Dead to WWE. If you stay inside and you have these walls, you’re gonna have a nice life and it’s safe and it’s easy, and you can make decent money, and it’s good. But you can go outside those walls, and you can survive on your own, but you have so hustle. So I have huge respect for anyone who is willing to leave WWE and go out and hustle on their own. I think Mercedes is killing it. She’s doing a great job at keeping herself relevant and keeping herself in conversations, being a huge talking point in the wrestling business. Showing up at New Japan and doing what she did was a big deal.”
>On if he thinks she’ll show up in AEW: “Yeah, without a doubt. I don’t even know if that would start… I could almost see her being a free agent for a while and just doing spots at AEW. I could definitely see that happening. It wouldn’t surprise me if she ends up showing up this coming up Dynamite as the mystery partner. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. I don’t know, I don’t have that information, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”
>On how big it would be for AEW: “”She’s a big star. There’s no if, ands, or buts about it. She really has put a ton of equity on her name, and on her character, on her identity as a pro wrestler. She’s been able to continue to hold that as she hasn’t even working with WWE. She’s kept herself in the headlines, which is great. Her coming to AEW would be a big deal. I feel like in some ways it would be very similar to, almost like a Cody situation in some ways. It’s like a huge jump, left WWE and came to AEW. It would have that feel, yeah.”
Source: Extreme Life of Matt Hardy podcast
