Travicity
09-18-2010, 06:29 PM
Why Pro Wrestling Illustrated selected "The Phenomenal" AJ Styles as #1 in this year's PWI 500 (as the top male wrestler of the year): "I went into the 500 meeting (we have about seven or eight of us, including some editors, the publisher, & a couple of senior writers), and we all sat down and decided what's the top five and what everyone was thinking as the consensus for number one. I came in thinking at the time that Chris Jericho was the guy I was leaning towards, and I think the reason for that was because he had done so much in the previous year and had been so underrated, I think I was rating him a little higher to make up for that almost. And then when somebody pointed out that AJ Styles at that time had held the TNA World Title maybe 260 days of the 325 days during the grading period, it just really made a lot of sense. AJ had become the franchise guy for TNA. They finally gave him a nice long run with the belt. They gave him Ric Flair, they gave him some wins over Kurt Angle. He was really the guy carrying the ball through the first half of the year. We looked at some of the inconsistencies of guys like John Cena & Triple H (who had gone out with injury) and some of the other usual suspects, we realized that AJ overall had the best year, and once his name came out there we all looked at each other said 'Yeah, it's AJ,' and AJ became our first TNA #1 in the PWI 500. It's great that the guy who broke that for them is one of their homegrown guys and not somebody who had other experience with WCW or WWE. AJ is really the face of the company, and it was a pleasure to have him as the top guy."
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