Ricky Starks pulled back the curtain on his promo from the December 7, 2022 episode of AEW Dynamite.
Ricky Starks is having his biggest push thus far as he gets ready to challenge Maxwell Jacob Friedman, MJF for the AEW World Championship and Dynamite Diamond Ring on Wednesday, December 14 at AEW Winter is Coming. On December 7, Ricky and Maxwell set the stage for their match with a very heated back-and-forth promo. Now, Ricky is detailing the behind-the-scenes of that angle, revealing in a new interview with Liam Crowley of Comic Book that he wrote and memorized the entire promo.
"I think you'll hear a lot of wrestlers say, 'Oh, I didn't think of it. I didn't plan it out, I didn't write it out.' Cody [Rhodes] makes the same joke, but that's bull," Starks said. "Even the best promos had to have some type of structure to them. I am somewhat in the same way, admittedly. I'm not one to really pull back the curtain on anything here, but yesterday, earlier in the day, I had wrote out this whole thing, and in my head memorized it and did all this, and stressed myself out, and then had a match to do. Anything could have gone wrong where I just forget it in the match."
Despite the fact that Ricky Starks knows that every good promo needs to have some structure, once MJF started ripping on him off the cuff, Starks wanted to prove that he could hang on that level as well.
"I remember Max cutting that promo and saying these comments, and in that moment I was like, 'I'll just wing it. I'll just wing it. I know where I want to go and what I want to get to, and I'll just fill in the blanks.,'" Starks continued. "So what you saw out there was me winging it. That's how I operate. Yes, I can come up with some lines and think about it, but for the most part, whatever I feel, I just say, and it comes off in that moment."
That segment between MJF and Ricky Starks was the highest-viewed YouTube clip from the 12/7 Dynamite. Fans can see YouTube views and ratings information for the most recent episode at this link.
We will have full coverage of AEW Winter is Coming on Wednesday, December 14.
