Dan Lambert gets to say what he likes, for the most part, on AEW programming thanks to Tony Khan’s hands-off approach.
Lambert is the founder of American Top Team, a renowned mixed martial arts (MMA) gym, and now the mouthpiece for Ethan Page and Scorpio Sky, collectively known as Men of the Year. The life-long pro-wrestling fan often has his hands wrapped around an AEW microphone and says his words are, mostly, his own.
“Luckily, over there you get some input into what you’re going to do. You write your own scripts. You say what you want to say. You can incorporate some of your own personality if you want to and it seems like the people who get the best reactions do,” Lambert tells Cageside Seats’ Shakiel Mahjouri. “I think you see certain guys in pro-wrestling who come up with something that has nothing to do with how they truly feel or who they really are. They force it and it doesn’t really connect with people.”
Lambert asserts that he can only speak from his own experiences, but his experiences are very liberating.
“I don’t know what it’s like for everybody there. I can only speak for myself,” he begins. “But the first time I walked in, I texted Tony before I got there and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to say something like this,’ And he texted me back and said, ‘great.’
“He [Khan] obviously is going to have some creative control if I’m going to do something that’s going to be stupid or get somebody in trouble; although, it might be fun to get cancelled. But I don’t want to cause him any headaches, but at some point, that might happen.”
Lambert also details how his friendship with Khan blossomed a couple of years ago. Khan was meeting with Jorge Masvidal in Miami, Florida. Lambert received a call from Masvidal’s manager, Malki Kawa, who informed Lambert that he should meet Khan, Lambert’s brother from whom he was figuratively “separated at birth.”
“I hung up the phone, looked at my wife, said ‘See ya, get another ride home.’ And I hauled ass,” Lambert says. “Tony is just a super cool dude. He’s a wrestling nerd like I am, which is kind of crazy because he is younger and didn’t grow up watching the same stuff I did, but he knows everything about it... When it came down to Miami, we were just talking and he was like, ‘Hey, do you want to pop in and do a promo. Bring a couple of fighters, have some fun? It was probably just going to be a one-off, in my opinion. So we did it and afterwards, he texted me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to come by next week?’”
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