3. Seth Rollins On What He Thought About The Eye For An Eye Match, Compares It To Lake Of Reincarnation In AEW
While speaking to talkSPORT, WWE RAW wrestler Seth Rollins discussed the “Eye for an Eye” match between him and Rey Mysterio at The Horror Show At Extreme Rules.
Below are the highlights:
On how he prepared for the match:
“Obviously it’s a match that has never been done before. I think people maybe tuned in out of morbid curiosity to see what would happen.
I certainly did not expect to be in that match at any point leading up to it. When the stipulation was given to me, I was definitely caught off guard and didn’t even really know how to prepare for it.
I’ve watched back a fair amount of Rey Mysterio matches over my lifetime and going into the match I tried to study First Blood matches because that was kind of the only thing and the only match type that I could understand was akin to an Eye for an Eye match.
I went back and studied some of those matches and saw how they were and how they went and stuff like that, so going into the Eye for an Eye match, I knew it was going to be a mix of us trying to gauge each other’s eyes out and getting one another in a position to do such a thing which would involve some actual professional wrestling.”
On if they succeeded in their goal:
“At the end of the day, was it ideal? No. Did it catch people’s attention? Sure. It ended up on TMZ.
I think we sort of accomplished what wrestling wants to accomplish and that is we told a very interesting story and there was some outside interest in the finish even though it was very weird – and that’s OK.
I think pro-wrestling can just be one-on-one, hold-for-hold wrestling or it can be storytelling like any other form of television and I think that when you start to look at it too critically, especially stuff like that…I dunno, to me it reeks of 2020 trying to pick everything apart.
If you like the Lake of Reincarnation in AEW but you hate the Eye for an Eye match…you know what I mean? Then where are we really at here?”
On who produced the match:
“A lot of the time, Vince says ‘here’s what we want to do’ and he gives us the ball and let us figure out how to take it to the end zone.
Again, when the idea was presented to me, I was aghast. I thought it was ridiculous and a bit of a joke. But the more I thought about it and the more it came to pass I was like ‘OK, this will be different.’ And it can be good and we don’t have to scoff at everything right out of the gate – I don’t want to be that person.
Vince wasn’t as hands on as people think that he was. If I’m going to break the fourth wall here, so to speak, it was really 99.9% myself, Rey Mysterio and Jamie Noble.
At the end of the day, you had Vince who made the final call on what the last shot was going to look like and that’s pretty much it.
There was a couple of versions of what that final shot would look like and we went with the one that we thought made the most sense. It was a joint-decision on everybody’s behalf.
So at the end of the day, it was a product that I was pretty proud of. It was the first time I’d been able to be out there in the ring with a legend like Rey Mysterio for an extended period of time and, like I said, we had a really good wrestling match with a provocative finish and I was not upset about it one bit.”
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