At AEW Revolution, William Regal made his AEW debut, mending fences between Jon Moxley and Bryan Danielson.
The trio would form the Blackpool Combat Club and eventually add Wheeler Yuta as their "young lion" in the group.
Speaking to The Gazette, Regal revealed that it was Moxley who came up with the name for the group.
“I would love to claim it was my idea, but it wasn’t. It was Jox Moxley’s idea. I had just come into the company after being asked to come in by Bryan Danielson because it sounded like a lot of fun. I was initially planning to take a year off, I wasn’t going to do anything because I haven’t done anything other than wrestling for the last 39 years. All of a sudden, I heard Jon’s name was involved which piqued my interest even more and it’s ended up how it’s ended up. Straight away there was a chemistry there because in real life there’s a chemistry there. People know a lot about me and Bryan but they might not know as much about me and Jon but these are stories we can tell over time. Jon came up to me and said he’s got a great idea for a name, because he had come up with different Blackpool things. I told him it’s not about me, it’s about the two of them, I’m just a spare part here and riding on your coattails. But he insisted we called it this," he said.
He continued by saying, "That meant a lot because Blackpool has given me everything good in my life and I’ve done everything I can do to make sure that, regardless of where I went, I was always billed from Blackpool. I moved there when I was 16, I spent time there as a child on holidays, I started my wrestling career there, I lived in Blackpool for 10 years, I had a house for 12 years, I met my wife there, my first two children were born at Victoria Hospital, everything good in my life came from Blackpool. So Jon and Bryan have always heard me telling these stories and they just wanted to use the name because they feel if it wasn’t for Blackpool, I wouldn’t be wrestling and I wouldn’t be in America. The way they look at it, they wouldn’t have come around if it wasn’t for me. That’s not the way I look at it though, because I feel I’m fortunate to have them in my life, they think it’s the other way around. Bryan has been to Blackpool quite a lot because he wrestled a lot in England for a lot of years, but Jon hadn’t. But he just likes the sound of it. I didn’t think it would go any further than that conversation but then we get to television last week and he showed me his phone and he’s got these designs for different stuff. I replied ‘oh, are we actually going to do this then? This is a thing?’ We went out that night and I had no idea he was going to say it on TV, but he said it and the next morning there are t-shirts out, so I ran with it. When you get an opportunity, you run with it. So that was how it happened.”
The Blackpool Combat club is undefeated in tag team and trios action since forming. They most recently defeated AFO (Angelico, The Blade & The Butcher) on the May 4 episode of AEW Dynamite.
Fightful has live coverage of AEW Dynamite every Wednesday beginning at 8 p.m. ET.
