Dave Meltzer Addresses AEW Issues With Rey Fenix, Willie Mack

AEW has been receiving its fair share of criticism for what has happened to two of its stars, Rey Fenix and Willie Mack. Fenix has made it publicly clear that he is not happy with the fact that he is being forced to stay in AEW, and has taken his frustrations to social media in recent weeks. As for Mack, he was reportedly pulled from upcoming GCW events due to the comments that GCW star Effy made about AEW President Tony Khan's father. With all that in mind, Dave Meltzer assessed both situations on "Wrestling Observer Radio," starting with Fenix.

"With AEW, if you get hurt in AEW, like basically they–you're supposed to get a doctor yourself. They'll pay for everything, but you're supposed to get the doctor..." Meltzer said, pointing out that WWE and NJPW sets up the doctor appointments for its wrestlers. "I don't know the whole story because he's just done some tweets about just being unhappy, inhumane treatment. I think that's what it is, he's going to have to elaborate further." 

Meltzer went on to explain that he knew of many wrestlers who at one point in time when they were unhappy with WWE extending their contracts, they would try and get themselves fired in a variety of different ways. None of these apparently worked, but it's a similar situation with Fenix as Meltzer was told he's got a long time left on his deal. "One of his friends told me like a year as far as injury time that they've tacked on, and obviously he wants to go to WWE, and he can't go. Tony Khan is in a wrestling war with WWE, he's not going to do them any favors, and unfortunately Fenix is caught in the crossfire."

Meltzer then moved on to the situation regarding Willie Mack, which was originally seen as AEW pulling another one of their stars off of a GCW event in the same way they did with Ricky Starks. However, Meltzer noted that this situation has two sides that are wildly different to one another.

"This is the GCW side of it. Willie Mack called them up for Saturday, it's a late deal and said he was pulled from the show by AEW over the Effy situation. Brett Lauderdale [GCW owner], really upset, calls up Sonjay Dutt at AEW and goes 'is this true?' and Sonjay says 'it's absolutely not true.'" This reportedly led Mack to be contacted again, to which he reportedly said that he wasn't actually pulled from the show, but that Christopher Daniels had told Mack that he shouldn't go to the event.

So what was AEW's side of the story? "They're saying that nothing like that happened, and that Willie Mack called them and asked them if it would be a problem to go, and they said 'you can go,' but maybe he took it the wrong way. But AEW was very, very clear." Meltzer rounded off by saying that it seems as if the decision to not perform for GCW was made by Mack himself, but it is unclear as to how deep the problems between AEW and GCW run, especially considering long-time GCW staple Matt Cardona will be main eventing the ROH Final Battle pay-per-view against Chris Jericho for the ROH World Championship on December 20.

Please credit "Wrestling Observer Radio" and give a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.