In an interview with Fightful, Tom Lawlor spoke about teaming with Fred Rosser for a recent ROH taping and why he hopes to do it again. Here are highlights:
On teaming with Fred Rosser: “Well, when you bring that up and start talking about it, it reminds me of teaming with Davey Boy Smith in a lot of ways. It’s a guy that I fought over and over, I’ve done battle with in the past and it’s not hard for us, necessarily, to get on the same page. Now it was weird teaming with Fred and there’s been so many times where I’ve just been in matches and my sole focus was to rip this guy’s face off, no matter how many other people were on the sidelines, involved in the match, whatever. To team with him is weird, but obviously I have great respect for this guy. Probably more respect than anybody out there realizes. I’ve been to one professional wrestling seminar that I can remember in recent times and it was a Fred Rosser seminar, let me just put it that way. So I’m happy to team with him. I hope I get to more.”
On wrestling Rosser for the first time: “I remember, I was on my way to that taping. It was during the pandemic, the first time I wrestled him. I’m the kind of guy, I love the idea of those PWG Mystery Vortex shows where you don’t know what’s going to happen. I love one night tournaments because you don’t know who’s gonna make it to the second round and sometimes it’s a guy that is an alternate and loses in his alternate fight, and somehow his alternate makes it through. But I didn’t ask who I was facing until I was on my way to that show. When I found out, I was like, ‘What? Excuse me? Alright.’ It was not somebody I expected to have any sort of in-ring chemistry with or, honestly, any kind of chemistry with. I’d watched Fred as a Primetime Player. I had watched him with his little bow tie on hanging out with Bob Backlund. To see him now, clearly it’s the same guy, but you’d be hard pressed to find anybody that knew, really knew, that this was the kind of guy that he was.”
On NJPW Strong as the best weekly wrestling show: “Yeah, I really think that the two year run of the weekly STRONG shows, if you watch them, it was consistently over that two year span, I think, the best weekly pro wrestling show. There was not a ton of bullshit or simple angles. There was some of the top stars you see on wrestling TV now were competing on those shows. I loved it.”
