This Book Is All Elite: The Inside Story of All Elite Wrestling

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Fantasy Booking Into Action

In the mid-1990S, before Tony Khan was even in high school, he was envisioning the uprising that would redefine professional wrestling.

“I’d been watching wrestling since I was seven years old,” he said. “When I was twelve, I went online—they didn’t have Google yet—and I started asking questions about how professional wrestling really worked.”

It was the first time he learned about the entertainment aspects of the art form, receiving a glossary of insider terminology and a list of popular performers’ actual names.

“I’d never had everything explained to me like that,” he continued. “Then, on the dial-up internet, I found a group of fans who loved wrestling as much as I did. We became friends. And some of them, I’m still in contact with to this day.”

Khan had reached a point of no return. “I started writing a newsletter that only my friend and myself really read. And we found a game called Rampage Wrestling that we played on MS-DOS. There was no video, not even pictures. But we had ratings for agility, size, skill, even for people who fought dirty. There was a singles class and a tag team class. A tag team specialist would have a higher rating in that class than a singles specialist.”

In the back of the classroom, he’d compile lists of the competitors he’d seen on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), Jim Cornette’s Smoky Mountain Wrestling (SMW), and other edgy promotions, booking them into fantasy matches, allegiances, and longterm storylines. He even invented an episodic TV show.

Its name: Dynamite.

While others outgrow their childhood obsessions, Khan’s became more intense. After graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2007, he realized that he was uniquely qualified to fulfill his dream of starting a wrestling promotion.

The son of Shad Khan, owner of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars and London’s Fulham Football Club, Tony became an integral part of the family business. As a sports executive, he’d work with both the Jags and Fulham FC in operations and recruiting, using his unique vantage point to assess the pro wrestling landscape.

“I built a good reputation as an expert in sports analytics and team management,” he said, “as well as working with sports media partners around the world.”

As he busied himself with his responsibilities for Fulham and the Jaguars, Khan watched the steady growth of indie wrestling, smaller promotions generally perceived as an alternative to the commercial fare most fans saw each week on World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) broadcasts.

“Wrestling had sort of become monotonous,” said referee Aubrey Edwards. “There was only one major company (in North America). They were doing their thing and that was it.” And she wasn’t alone. Kenny Omega, who held the prestigious IWGP Heavyweight Championship in Japan for the latter part of 2018, had also been a childhood fan but became “disenchanted” with the product widely viewed in North America. “I felt that with all the varieties of wrestling throughout the world, something new and diverse could be created and universally enjoyed,” he said, “something that would combine all types of styles, like the techniques of Mexican lucha libre, British strong style, and what was available in Japan, where the strikes were harder and it was more martial arts based. You just had to take the journey.”

Unbeknownst to Omega, Khan was already on that path, strongly relating to those fans who regularly packed arenas for Pro Wrestling Guerrilla (PWG) in Los Angeles, DEFY in Seattle, and Revolution Pro (RevPro) in the United Kingdom, among other leagues, while closely following the industry across the Pacific, particularly Japan’s largest pro wrestling organization, New Japan Pro-Wrestling.

“I’d use the word ‘starved’ to describe how the fan base felt about an alternative,” said future AEW World Champion Maxwell Jacob Friedman, or MJF. “But AEW would end up doing it at a much higher level than I think anyone could have anticipated.

“I think it’s fair to say that, in many ways, AEW would bring back pro wrestling.”

The process began in earnest in 2018 when Khan began turning the fantasy booking of his youth into a viable business plan. By this stage, he was enough of a student of the game to understand why past upstart promotions had failed. By contrast, the organization he hoped to create would not be a vanity project—launched by a “money mark,” the derogatory term for a fan who falls into money and throws it away on a league that instantly flames out—but a serious, revenuegenerating venture.

“I’d built connections and friendships, so when the opportunity crystallized, I was in a position to capitalize on my ideas,” Khan said. “The business model for pro wrestling had really changed when the TV rights fees increased. You could sell a show for tens of millions of dollars, sign a roster of wrestlers, and air fifty-two weeks a year.

“There was a new opportunity to launch a promotion profitably and internationally that hadn’t really existed until then. The idea was to build a TV show and develop a franchise of pay-per-views.”

By sheer circumstance, in April 2018, he happened to attend a party in Beverly Hills, where he ran into a friend, Kevin Reilly, an important executive at WarnerMedia, the company overseeing such networks as CNN, TBS, TNT, and Max. TBS and TNT had already been the home of World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the last company to attempt to make a run as industry leader in North America, prior to its demise and absorption by WWE in 2001.

A new wrestling group was needed, Khan and Reilly agreed—something tailored to the desires of current fans and on a scale few had tried before. Perhaps they might create one together.

“As we were talking, a lightbulb went off,” Khan said. “Once I saw his interest, I started working on my project.”

Meanwhile, Cody Rhodes—a ten-year WWE veteran who “bet on himself” by leaving the company in 2016 and quickly rising to prominence on the indie scene—and other indie stars, like Matt and Nick Jackson of the Young Bucks, were methodically putting the bricks in place to stage the first All In on September 1, 2018. The card would feature a conglomeration of stars not regularly highlighted on North American television.

“Indie wrestling was really booming at the time,” Omega said. “And when indie wrestling is booming, it’s almost a sign—not necessarily that you don’t like what you’re getting from the big cat in town, but you also want something else you’re not getting from there.”

The goal was to draw an attendance of ten thousand or more—a benchmark the pundits at the time said was impossible for any group but WWE.

Although Ring of Honor (ROH), arguably North America’s most respected smaller promotion during that period, would provide logistical and production support, Rhodes and the Young Bucks, as well as their families, were involved in organizing the historic card, recruiting talent from New Japan, Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL) and AAA in Mexico, TNA Impact!, the remnants of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), and a wide range of indie groups.

“The timing couldn’t have been better,” remembered Alex Reynolds from Dark Order. Bullet Club—a faction that had started in Japan—was popular enough in the United States that the group’s merchandise could be found in shopping malls. Of particular interest to Western fans was Bullet Club’s subfaction, the Elite, which included Rhodes, the Bucks, Omega, and “Hangman” Adam Page. Being the Elite, an internet show created by the Bucks and centered on the group as they traveled the world, engaging in often comical interactions with other wrestlers, was growing in appeal. “There were just so many eyes on the product.”

For the past several years, the Bucks had grown accustomed to earning more money at the merchandise table than in the ring in certain venues. “From seeing us on Being the Elite, the people would line up and hope that they’d end up on an episode,” said Matt Jackson. “The show became a giant infomercial that we put up every Monday morning.

We took everybody on a personal journey. We showed the people the positive and negative, the highs and lows, the friendships, the travel woes. We became more than wrestlers to these people, and bonded in a very special way with the fans.”

Recalled Page, “It was a wild time in wrestling. Everything involving the Bullet Club and the Elite was so over (well liked). There was this wave of momentum that felt like all these eyeballs were finally on us.”

But Khan was also visualizing his own promotion and beginning a dialogue with some of the key players involved with All In.

While many of the wrestlers viewed the endeavor with a touch of cynicism, “the first people who really took this seriously were Matt Jackson and his wife, Dana,” Khan said.