Posted on 2/24/126 by Colin Vassallo
Darby Allin sat down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast
Creative Studio in Hollywood, California to discuss climbing
Mount Everest, crashing through a pane of glass during
Sting’s last match, getting launched onto the announce table
by Claudio Castagnoli, whether he sees himself becoming AEW
World Champion, whether he thinks his spots ever go too far,
winning the TNT Championship, breaking his foot in the ring,
getting hit by a bus in New York, and more!
7,000 people have climbed Mount Everest. That’s it.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It just puts things into perspective,
kind of how small your problems are, what you think is so
big really doesn’t mean a thing. It’s very humbling when
you’re up there, because it’s hard to have an ego when
you’re fighting for your life on a daily basis. Because you
don’t care about how you look, you don’t care about how you
smell. You just want to survive. So it’s pretty cool to be
in that type of energy.”
There is a real possibility you could die up there. Did you
say your goodbyes before you went up there? Did that hit
you?
“Yeah, absolutely. I climbed with my mom and my brother to
base camp, and the base camp hike, to a lot of people it’s
no joke, it takes like 10-12 days. The elevation is like
17,000 [feet]. But the reality hit me when my mom and my
brother were leaving base camp, and now I had to stay behind
to actually go for the summit, and I was going to be there
for another month after they left, but when I saw them
walking away, the reality hit, oh sh*t, this might be the
last time you see them. Then it just thought about, this
might be the last time you’ve seen anybody. I was like, Oh
crazy. So I went in my tent and I cried, and I filmed a
little vlog about it and stuff, being like, there’s no way
I’m gonna die on this mountain. I’m gonna summit, then I’m
going to come back down and see a lot of people. So it was a
commitment I made to myself when I was up there.”
What was the reason you wanted to do it?
“What I said earlier, I wanted to tell myself I was capable
of anything, because you find yourself on this hamster wheel
in wrestling. There’s no off-season. It’s all year long. And
sometimes you feel like you’re living your life for somebody
else. I wanted to really find out who I was going to be on
the other side of Everest, and I didn’t want to live my life
for somebody else. I wanted to really prove to myself what I
was capable of. Because it goes back to the politicking and
everything like that and the egos. I can’t stand it.”
Have they [AEW] ever told you that’s too much? We don’t want
to do that.
“The Sting spot, easily, the Sting spot. [So this is off the
ladder through the glass?] Yeah. I remember the moment I hit
it, my adrenaline was just going through the roof and the
referee comes up, ‘How are you feeling?’ I feel good. He’s
like, oh sh*t. My insides got sliced into the glass, and
then he’s like, ‘We got to bring you to the back.’ I was
like, There’s no way you can bring me to the back. So if you
see me come back into the match at the very end, I’m wrapped
in duct tape. And I was like, just wrap it up, I only have
one more spot. So let’s finish strong. I can’t go to the
back. I remember Tony saying that could have been really
bad.”
You splatted when you hit, it looked like the glass barely
breaks your fall. Did it hurt?
“Surprisingly not. But a couple of weeks later, I’m still
pulling glass out of myself. I don’t know. It wasn’t like,
oh my God, that was miserable. I was like that was chill. If
you look back at when I did the front flip off of the ladder
onto Jeff, I whisper in his ear when we’re laying down, I’m
like, that was fun, just to let him know. Because a lot of
these spots, when you do some crazy stuff, you don’t know
how the person you’re wrestling is going to be after it. So
it’s kind of good to give them the whole like, Dude, this is
cool.”
Do you have the goal of being AEW World Champion one day?
“I don’t know. It’s a weird question. It’s something I
talked to Sting about. I never really cared about
championships. I care more about just good storylines. To
me, that’s where I feel like my head is on that thing. Would
it be cool to be the face of a company? Yes, absolutely,
considering I do feel like I best represent what AEW can
give. Because you take a guy like Darby Allin, where would
have Darby fit in the grand scheme of pro wrestling if it
wasn’t for AEW? But you just see, hey, here’s a guy, be
you.”