Former UFC Heavyweight Champion Junior Dos Santos and Dan Lambert of American Top Team appeared on an episode of Ariel Helwani’s “The MMA Hour,” where Dan Lambert talked about how he became involved with AEW and Junior Dos Santos talking about his involvement with AEW, how he felt when he was put through a table by Jake Hager and how he feels appreciated in AEW.
Below are the highlights:
Dan Lambert on how he became involved with AEW:
“I got a call one night. I was out to dinner with my wife and an old friend who had just come into town that I haven’t seen in years. We’re five minutes into dinner, my phone rings, and it’s Malki Kawa saying, ‘Dude, you have to get down to Miami. I have a guy here that I’m sitting down and talking with, and you have to come meet him.’ I said, ‘Dude, I’m in the middle of dinner. I just got here. I can’t come. Who is it?’ He said, ‘It’s Tony Khan.’ I said, ‘I can leave here in five minutes.’ He had come down to meet with Malki and Masvidal, and a little bit into their conversation, Malki said, ‘You have to meet Dan.’ Tony is a wrestling fan and he watched Impact, so he said, ‘Bring him over.’ We came and we became friends. He’s kind of a nerdy wrestling fan like I am, so we hit it off.”
Junior Dos Santos on his involvement with AEW:
“Dan was the guy who introduced me to that world. He brought things from that world a little closer to me. I knew it, but I wasn’t really following it. As soon as I started to travel for those shows, I said to Dan, “Wow, these guys go for real. This thing can hurt very bad.’ They train and are well prepared for that. I felt like, ‘Man, I have to do this.’ I told Dan, and luckily, we got a great chance for our debut, and it was great.”
Junior Dos Santos on how he felt when he was put through a table by Jake Hager:
“Wow, that was a pretty hard one actually, but it was a great experience. Hager is also a great guy, a great wrestler, a great fighter, and is very well prepared for that. We did what we were supposed to do, and now I’m looking forward to having my turn to throw him on that table.”
Junior Dos Santos on how he feels appreciated in AEW:
“I like playing the bad guy in pro wrestling because it brings me a kind of comfort. I was feeling so excited for this debut. In the MMA world I was feeling a lot of pressure with people demanding things all the time and not caring about you and now I was there [in AEW] and I was being appreciated to be there so I felt amazing and I said man this is an amazing feeling, this is something that I felt at the beginning of my [MMA] career and the middle of my career when I became champion and it’s great to be feeling it again.”
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