Konnan On Why He Feels Tony Khan Is 'Still In Diapers' Booking AEW

Veteran pro wrestling star Konnan has discussed the various issues that pro wrestling bookers face, highlighting how AEW President Tony Khan is at the start of his career as a booker.

Konnan, in a new episode of "K100," the podcast he hosts with Glenn "Disco Inferno" Gilbertti, talked about AEW's booking. The topic turned to how it's impossible to understand a booker's position until you've been there, which Tony Khan has now been for about three and a half years and a little over three years producing weekly television shows. In Konnan's eyes, that's not a lot of time, to the point that he made a particularly colorful comparison.

"He's still in diapers, bro," Konnan said. "And the thing is that I don't want to sound vainglorious — what a tremendous word — but the thing is it's like anything else: If you've never been a booker, you can read about it, you can talk about it, you could talk to people that were bookers. But unless you're there, you don't understand the bulls**t that a booker goes through. It's a very thankless situation. When you do what the talent wants? You're the best. You don't? You're a d*ck, you have something against them." 

He further went on to state that it is difficult to keep everybody happy as a booker, explaining how wrestlers may not want to face certain wrestlers or the challenge of retaining a wrestler when there's interest in their services from another company.

Konnan then laid out how the most important thing that becomes clear with booking experience is just how much a booker needs to manage the emotions of their top stars. 

"There's so many things that people don't know about, and here's the biggest thing: You have no idea how big a baby and insecure — and I understand why — the biggest stars actually are," he explained. "They're afraid to lose their spot. They're afraid that everything they've worked for, somebody's gonna come and take it away, not understanding that the only person that can take away your spot is you."

Konnan then compared being the booker to coaching a sports team. Nobody knows exactly what's going on between every one as well as the head coach does. "It's easy to second-guess people, but you're not there," he said. "Same thing with booking."

Though he's still fairly new at it — albeit with more experience than most at this point — Tony Khan had an interest in the art of booking pro wrestling and formatting wrestling TV shows decades before he was ever involved in the wrestling business. In the past, he's recounted how, as a teenager, he sent his fantasy booking formats to Memphis territory office mainstay Randy Hales, something that Hales himself confirmed in an April 2022 tweet.