Swerve Strickland reflects on his Hell Of War match with AR Fox.
The match, which took place in Lucha Underground in 2016, is often regarded as one of the best matches of both Strickland and Fox's careers. At the time, Strickland was wrestling under the Killshot moniker and AR Fox was known as Dante Fox.
While speaking to T.J. Jefferson of The Rich Eisen Show for a new interview, Strickland talked about the thought process behind the match and how he and Fox wanted to make sure nobody could copy it in the future.
“First, we were like, ‘Do we have enough? I don’t know if we have enough. I think we have enough.’ We’re at the point of like, okay, this is Ultima Lucha. There’s been some crazy matches, the bar is already high enough. What do we do to not only raise it, what do we do to etch our name in it where people, they can’t copy this because it’s us. There’s no way you can copy this feeling and this energy. We’re just coming up with concepts just like, this only works if Fox is in this position, this only works if Killshot is in this position and I think that’s what clenches that match so close to us and why the fans are attached to it. Even years later, they still talk about it because it’s like, man, those guys, it had to be them. There’s no other way, it almost feels like Frieza fighting Goku on Planet Nanik. There’s no other fight that can happen to blow up that planet because it had to be them. It had to be those two and that’s what the mindset of it was. If you see these moments in a match and you take the characters out and just have a silhouette, you know that was Kill Shot, you know that was Fox.”
Strickland recently re-signed with AEW. Fans can learn more about that story by subscribing to Fightful Select.
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