AEW star and current ROH Women’s Champion Athena recently joined Women’s Wrestling Talk to hype her match with Billie Starkz at tonight’s Final Battle pay-per-view, as well as discuss a number of different topics regarding her career. One topic the Fallen Angel spoke about was her relationship with Tony Khan.
I have found that I have a very good collaboration with my boss, which is something that I feel like I was missing for a very, very long time. And the fact that he trusts me to make certain calls and a lot of times Billie is just staring at a wall, if you really want to know. Like Billy is just off smiling in a corner somewhere. And Lexy, you know, Lexy is just trying to make sure Billie doesn’t fall down and hurt herself. But between me and TK, it’s a really cool, like coloration that we’ve had with this entire thing; because we’ve taken a lot of risks. I think across the board that are outside my character; that are outside stuff that he normally does, and it’s paid off every step of the way. But that’s just having trust with one another.
Shifting subjects, Athena speaks about the importance of the ROH brand and how happy she’s been to be such an important part of it under Tony Khan.
The beauty of Ring of Honor, Tony has allowed them to showcase themselves. Tony has allowed them to have storylines outside of the main championship. And I think on some level, he is experimenting with what he can and can’t do with the roster. So to me, it’s always been a collaboration with me and TK, it’s always been. I go into the office, hey, we have a conversation, which ends up great. Sometimes we butt heads. But hey, who hasn’t butt heads with their boss before. But 99.9% of the time we come out happier and better and honestly, the storyline has benefited from day one, when he pulled us in the office and said, ‘Hey, there’s something here. I think we’re going to pull the trigger on this. Him allowing me to make certain calls and me allowing him to make certain calls has made this an absolute banger of a feud, has made this an absolute banger of a storyline and it’s brought a lot of eyes to Ring of Honor that I don’t think people were expecting.
In a separate interview, Athena spoke about the pressures of headlining Final Battle. You can read about that here.