Before the November 5 episode of “AEW Dynamite” went live, AEW President and CEO Tony Khan announced the introduction of a brand new championship, the AEW National Championship. Khan noted that the title will be an homage to the NWA National Championship that was prominent during the 1980s, which prompted some less than savory responses from current members of the NWA roster as the NWA National Championship still technically exists to this day. However, those frustrations seem to have been put to rest as Khan revealed during a recent live stream on X (formerly known as Twitter) that he has had a very nice conversation with the President of the NWA, Billy Corgan.
“Of course, the NWA National Championship has a great history of its own, and when we created a National Champion, I saw NWA wrestlers saying ‘Hey, we have a National Title.’ Well AEW is a separate company, we have our own lineage, and I’d just like to say that Billy, I have a lot of respect for him, I have a lot of respect for what he’s doing. I really love the traditions of pro wrestling and I had a really nice talk with Billy, and we hadn’t talked in a long time so I think it was good for him to hear this. I respect him and I respect the NWA, and we’re trying to do something different here. We brought pro wrestling back to TBS, but there are a lot of promotions that have had a great history on TBS before AEW and one of them is the NWA. I think it’s great Billy’s trying to keep that tradition alive and revive it, so we had a really nice talk about this.”
The inaugural AEW National Champion will be decided at the Full Gear pay-per-view on November 22 via a Casino Gauntlet match. Five individuals have officially declared themselves for the match, those being Bobby Lashley, Shelton Benjamin, Ricochet, Kevin Knight, and “Speedball” Mike Bailey, but given the fact that Khan wants the title to be something wrestlers from every company can challenge for, there may be some international surprises come November 22.
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