Hangman Page and the Pain of Doubt
Adam Page was always talented. Generationally talented. The kind of talented that wrestlers like Cody Rhodes, Kenny Omega, and the Young Bucks could see before anyone else dared to say it out loud. He had the movements of a man twice his size and the agility of a man half his size. He had the timing of a seasoned veteran, and the emotional weight of a performer who didn’t need to pretend to feel anything, because he felt everything too deeply.
But if you asked Adam Page to talk about how talented he was, he’d say he wasn’t sure. That maybe they were wrong. That maybe he was just a high school teacher pretending to be a cowboy pretending to be a wrestler.
That’s the core of Hangman Page. Not the cowboy boots or the buckshot lariat or the self-deprecating charm. It’s the doubt. The aching, gnawing doubt leads one to believe that one day, the cheers would stop, the curtain would rise, and everyone would see the truth. That he was just a man in borrowed clothes, faking his way through a spotlight too bright to hide in. He never learned how to kill that doubt. Only how to pour whiskey over its mouth until it stopped speaking.
Before AEW, Adam Page wandered. Ring of Honor gave him roots, New Japan gave him education. He honed his craft with reverence. He was recruited to join Bullet Club, and through them, The Elite, alongside Cody Rhodes, Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks. But inside The Elite, Page never quite felt like one of them. He was the other one. Not invisible, just always a little to the side, like someone who stepped into the frame of a family portrait by accident. And that, perhaps, was the cruelest irony. Because the Elite didn’t just tolerate him, they embraced him. At the time, they were the hottest act in wrestling, and they didn’t treat Page as an accessory to that act. They treated him as essential. They saw something in him and they told him so with open arms and eager invitations.
And that only made it worse. Because Page couldn’t see it. Couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t believe it. And when people you admire see something in you that you can’t find in yourself, it doesn’t inspire, it isolates. It turns love into pressure. It turns admiration into burden. He didn’t want to let them down, but more than that, he was terrified that the moment they looked too closely, they’d realize their mistake. That the brilliance they projected onto him was just their own reflection.
Kenny Omega moved like a Final Fantasy protagonist mid-cutscene. He was sharp-edged, larger than life, framed in the glow of a wrestling world he seemed destined to save. The Young Bucks, Matt and Nick Jackson, soared in postmodern neon, two brothers wrapped in irony and sincerity at once. Cody Rhodes marched in gold and Americana, every movement declaring destiny like it had already been etched into his boots.
And Page? He was the youngest member, the least accomplished, and yet they handed him a seat at the table as if it had always been waiting for him. To The Elite, he was a pillar. The golden boy they saw before he even took shape. They gave him trust, matches, moments, and in doing so, they gave him a burden he didn’t know how to carry. Because every spotlight felt like a lie he was one bad match away from exposing. He told himself he belonged, but deep down he feared he was only there because they needed a fifth man, a new story, a fresh face. That the minute they found someone better, he’d be the first to be erased from the group photo.
Imposter syndrome doesn’t scream from the mountaintops. It settles in like fog. It twists every compliment into suspicion, every cheer into a countdown. It tells you that talent is luck, that inclusion is charity. You’re not one of them, it says. You’re a glitch in the system, a narrative mistake that somehow slipped through. And the more they believe in you, the louder it grows. Because it’s not fear of failure. It’s fear of discovery. That one day the truth will arrive: you were never supposed to be here.
And so Adam Page smiled. And drank. And played the part.
When AEW began, it was built on a promise that this would be a wrestler’s company. Not a playground for executives or a kingdom of part-time legends, but a home for the people who lived between the ropes. AEW trusted that the wrestlers could tell their stories, shape their destinies, build something real. And in that spirit, they looked to Adam Page.
It happened at All Out 2019 in Chicago. AEW’s first pay-per-view after their TV deal, their first true step into the unknown. It was their first world title match. The coronation of their identity. And Page was chosen to carry the spark. Not Cody. Not Kenny. Not the Bucks. It was Adam Page, flawed, beloved, raw, who was trusted to be the face of the revolution. That trust alone said everything about what AEW claimed to be: a wrestler’s company, not a nostalgia act dressed in modern clothes.
But standing across from him wasn’t a symbol of the future. It was Chris Jericho. A legend, yes. But also a relic. The antithesis of the AEW premise. Jericho was brilliance and bravado, but he was also safe. He was perfect for media rounds, perfect for morning radio shows and podcast appearances. He had the name, the legacy, the soundbites. He could talk circles around cynicism and sell a revolution with charm.
But Jericho wasn’t a wrestler’s wrestler. Not anymore. He wasn’t the embodiment of AEW’s promise; he was the exception to it. The symbol of a past AEW claimed to be moving beyond.
So when Chris Jericho stood tall at the end of that match, it wasn’t just that Page had lost. It was that he had been outwrestled and outsmarted by a man who had seen every trick in the book because he had helped write it. He found the opening, capitalized, and left with the title. And in doing so, he reminded the world that experience still mattered, that legacy could still win clean.
But to Page, it felt like a confirmation of his worst fear, that maybe heart wasn’t enough. That maybe hunger wasn’t enough. That even when the opportunity was real, he still couldn’t cross the finish line. As Jericho hoisted the belt and AEW’s new era began, Page felt exposed.
Kenny Omega was there. Supportive. Present. But presence can feel like distance when your confidence is fractured. Page didn’t say it out loud, but something shifted. He drank a little more. Laughed a little harder at the jokes made at his expense. Began to think maybe they were right. Maybe the jokes were truth in costume.
So he drank. At first, it was barely noticeable, a prop in a promo, a clinked glass with a smile. It looked like camaraderie. Like a cowboy having another glass of whiskey before riding off. But then you start to realize something: you rarely saw Adam Page without a drink in his hand. At ringside. Backstage. In vignettes. On posters. The cowboy and his whiskey, inseparable. What began as texture became pattern. It wasn’t for show. It was for shelter. The drinks made the doubt quieter. A little more manageable. A little more distant. He wasn’t spiraling. He was numbing.
What made this story remarkable, what made it artful, was the way AEW handled it. Wrestling has long mishandled stories involving alcohol. We've seen it wielded cruelly against the likes of Scott Hall in WCW, paraded like a punishment. We've seen it used to humiliate Jake Roberts, mocking addiction in the name of cheap heat. But Page’s story wasn’t about shame. It wasn’t a punchline. AEW never said the word. Never made it an angle. They simply let it exist. Quietly. Persistently. Like pain does. Like coping does. It wasn’t spectacle. It was subtext. And in wrestling, where so much is shouted, that kind of whisper hits like a thunderclap.
Then came the tag team. Kenny Omega and Hangman Page. And for a flicker of time, it was magic, raw, imperfect, and electrifying. Kenny Omega wasn’t just a great wrestler. He was the best wrestler in the world. Not by decree, but by execution. A man who turned matches into symphonies, who blended the stoic brutality of Japanese wrestling with the high-concept storytelling of anime and video games. Everything he did had weight. Precision. Myth.
For Page to stand beside Kenny was to live in awe. To tag with him was to carry a quiet panic with every lockup, every transition, every breath. Because Page wasn’t just tagging with the best wrestler in the world, he was trying not to break the spell. And yet, despite every missed cue, every moment where Page’s self-doubt leaked through the seams, Kenny never wavered. He never looked back in frustration. He never second-guessed his partner. Because Kenny believed in Page. He always had.
And then came Revolution 2020. Page and Omega versus the Young Bucks. It was AEW’s masterpiece, one of its first truly great matches, the one that would define its early years, perhaps only rivaled by the blood-soaked poetry of Cody versus Dustin Rhodes. It was a tag bout so frantic, so layered, so emotionally knotted, that it felt more like a breakup than a contest. It was family turning against itself. Page and the Bucks had history, resentment, affection, all woven into every strike. And at the center of it all stood Kenny, the fulcrum, the friend torn between the brothers he built AEW with and the partner who never quite believed he belonged.
Page and Omega won. Somehow, through all the miscommunication and buried pain, they won. Page hit the Buckshot. And for a second, just a second, it felt like everything was okay. Like the doubts were gone. Like the cowboy had a home.
But even in victory, the wound lingered. Page loved Kenny. Maybe not in words. Maybe not even in ways he fully understood. But it was there in the way he feared disappointing him more than losing
And that was the problem. Page was terrified of letting Kenny down. Every time he missed a cue, hesitated before a tag, or jumbled his words in a post-match promo, he felt the phantom sting of failure. And still, Kenny never lost faith. He trusted Page with every match, every moment, even when Page couldn’t return that faith in himself. That trust only made the silence louder.
The end didn’t come with a blow. It came with a loss to FTR at All Out 2020. The match was long, brutal, deliberate. Not the kind of match Page and Omega thrived in, but the kind that required cohesion, clarity, unity. The miscommunications weren’t subtle anymore. Tags were mistimed. Glances were not returned. Moves were missed by inches. And through it all, Kenny kept believing. Kept reaching. But Page…
Page was drifting. Emotionally hungover, mentally absent. He wasn’t wrestling like someone trying to win, he was wrestling like someone trying not to fall apart. And when the final bell rang, they hadn’t just lost the titles. They’d lost each other.
Kenny didn’t rage. He didn’t shout. He just stood there, staring at the mat as if waiting for a reason to still believe. Page tried to meet his eyes. Tried to offer a gesture. A word. Anything. But nothing came. Kenny walked away. And Page let him.
It was heartbreak without confession. And for Page, that silence echoed louder than any betrayal. Because when something ends without closure, you don’t get to hate. You only get to ache.
This was rock bottom. Page didn’t spiral in a dramatic crash, he withered, slowly, painfully, under the weight of his own doubt. He drifted further from the Young Bucks, whose friendship once felt like a tether, and now felt like a reminder of everything he was failing to be. He ignored their texts. He brushed off their support. He told himself they didn’t really want him around. The more they tried to reach out, the more convinced he became that their kindness was obligation, not love.
He was surrounded by people who loved him and he still felt alone.He smiled when the cameras rolled, drank when they didn’t, and sometimes when they did. Hangman Adam Page, the cowboy, the lonesome drifter, wasn’t a gimmick anymore. He was a hiding place.
And no one could reach him.
Kenny Omega, however, chose not to linger in the wreckage. He turned inward, but not in the way Page had. Where Page drowned his doubt in whiskey and silence, Kenny returned to his roots. Kenny Omega was not a tag wrestler anymore, not as a brother in The Elite anymore. Kenny Omega was the best wrestler on the planet. And he didn't just reclaim that title. He devoured it.
He aligned himself with Don Callis, a man as manipulative as he was brilliant, who saw in Kenny a weapon. Under Callis’s guidance, Kenny Omega didn’t need to chase greatness. He assumed it. He collected world titles like debts owed: AEW, Impact, AAA. Belt after belt, empire after empire. He became The Belt Collector, a living cheat code, a final boss wearing the pain of his past like a crown.
He buried the hurt beneath precision. He masked the grief with greatness. His matches became mythical, clinical, beautiful. If Page was trying to forget the past, Kenny was trying to outrun it, match by match, title by title. Until his heart only beat in the choreography of five-star classics.
Eventually, Adam Page found The Dark Order. Or they found him. Or they found each other. In the wake of Brodie Lee’s passing, both Page and the Dark Order were grieving something larger than themselves: loss, identity, direction. They didn’t save each other in a blaze of redemption. They just sat beside one another in the quiet, and for the first time in a long time, Page didn’t feel judged for his silence.
He started smiling again. Not performatively, but in little, forgotten ways. In backstage segments. In quiet, corny bits. The whiskey didn’t vanish, but it no longer followed him like a shadow. The drinks slowed. The laughs returned. The loneliness cracked. Through them, Page rediscovered the roots of the myth he once wore like armor: resilience, loyalty, quiet strength.
Page found cowboy shit.
With the Dark Order, he wasn’t trying to be a main eventer. Because they didn’t ask him to be great. They asked him to be a friend. And for a man who had spent years questioning if his presence had value, that kind of trust was revolutionary.
The build was slow. Earned. Every beat of the story layered with history, silence, and ache. Page didn’t charge into the title picture. He wandered back into it. With the Dark Order by his side, he found his footing again. He won matches, sometimes with grit. Sometimes with help. Sometimes with heart. And with every win, the fans cheered louder, as if trying to will him into believing what they already knew: he was ready. But Page wasn’t chasing a title. He was chasing peace. And to achieve peace, his path had to cross that of Kenny Omega.
By then, Omega was untouchable. He was colder, sharper, and more ruthless than the Kenny Omega that Adam Page once knew, because somehow, impossibly, the best wrestler in the world had gotten even better. The poetry in his footwork was now written in blood. The grace of his movement carried malice. This was Kenny Omega wielding his title like a sword forged in pain and daring anyone to try and take it from him. And yet, deep down, the man Page loved was still there, buried beneath the armor of perfection. Their title match wasn’t just about the championship. It was about closure. About unfinished sentences. About answering a question they’d both been too afraid to ask: what happens when everything that was left unsaid finally gets its say?
Kenny brought everything. He always did. He fought like a man trying to preserve the myth of himself, every strike a reminder that no one had carried the company like he had. Page fought like a man who was finally ready. Ready to stop hiding. Ready to meet the moment. Ready to believe that he deserved it all.
The match was violent, aching, exact. The Young Bucks stood ringside, not as participants, but as witnesses. And that meant everything. Because no one knew this story better than they did. They had lived it. They had fought beside both men. They had watched the rise, the fracture, the silence that followed. And now they stood there, not to interfere, not to shift the outcome, but to acknowledge it. It was their way of saying: this matters. You both matter.
The Young Bucks didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. Their presence was the apology that was never voiced, the blessing Page never asked for. And when the moment came, when Page looked them in the eye, the history passed between them like an offering. They nodded, not to Kenny, not to the crowd, but to Hangman. To the man who never believed he was enough, standing on the edge of the greatest moment of his life. They had seen his lowest point. Now they bore witness to his rise.
Buckshot Lariat.
One, two, three.
Page didn’t cry. He didn’t collapse. He just breathed a long, shuddering breath. In that breath lived every echo of doubt, every silent night he spent wondering if he was the weak link, the afterthought, the one who was never really meant to make it. It held the shame he wrapped in bravado, the fear he drowned in whiskey, the loneliness that followed him from airport to locker room to hotel bed. In that breath was the child who dreamed of being a cowboy, the young man who never believed he could be the hero, and the broken soul who had finally learned to stand still and let himself be loved.
He had done it. He had not just won. He had survived the weight of becoming. He had stared into the face of every lie he’d ever told himself and still pressed forward. He had endured. He had outlasted.
And then, the Dark Order came. They embraced him, one by one, not as a champion, but as their friend. They lifted him on their shoulders, not to show him off, but to hold him up, because for once, he had allowed himself to be carried.
There he was, above the crowd, arms wide, belt in hand, flanked by men who had seen him at his lowest and loved him anyway. It was joy without irony. Celebration without ego. The cowboy had come home, and the ones who waited at the door were the ones who reminded him he didn’t have to walk alone.
But triumph has an echo. And in the stillness that followed, when the crowd roared and the belt lay heavy in his hands, a question whispered beneath the noise:
Now what?
This is the insidious nature of the inner critic. It doesn’t vanish in victory. It waits. It bides its time. And when the cheers fade and the adrenaline dies, it slips in through the silence like smoke under a door. Your friends lift you high, and the voice inside still asks if they did it out of pity. You best the best in the world, and that same voice wonders if he let you win. You become the heart of the company, and the doubt inside whispers that you’ve only borrowed someone else’s story.
This is the sickness of the millennial mind. This is a generation raised to believe in achievement but taught by the world to expect collapse. Millennials were handed a world on fire and told to run through it, and if they didn't run fast or hard enough, they would be called lazy or entitled. They came of age during two wars built on false pretenses and with no clean ending, were taught the language of capitalism only to grow fluent in disillusionment. They graduated into economic recessions, crushing debt, rising rent, disappearing pensions. They were promised that hard work would matter. That grit and perseverance would open doors. That if they kept grinding, they’d be rewarded.
So when those rewards didn’t come fast enough, if they ever came at all, they didn’t blame the world. They blamed themselves. Maybe their parents were right. Maybe they hadn’t worked hard enough. Maybe they weren’t talented enough. Maybe it was their fault the dream hadn’t arrived on schedule. The system broke its promises, and millennials apologized for it.
Imposter syndrome lives in the wreckage of those broken promises. It is the voice that turns patience into shame and endurance into delusion. Millennials work. They achieve. And still, they wonder if it’s a fluke. If it’s a trick. If they’re actors in their own lives, waiting to be found out. They get what they wanted, and the voice inside tells them they didn't deserve it. That someone’s coming to take it back.
And in that moment, belt in hand and hoisted by love, Adam Page began to wonder if this, too, was a moment he wasn’t meant to survive. Not because he didn’t earn it. But because his entire generation had been taught that joy is a lie.
Then came CM Punk. A man who had once been the voice of the voiceless, now returned as the voice of certainty. He came to AEW cloaked in legacy, conviction, and the glow of unfinished myth. And for a while, the fit seemed perfect. Punk was the prodigal son returning to a company that valued wrestlers, stories, and second chances.
But Punk didn’t come to join. He came to take. Where Page had found strength in uncertainty, Punk saw weakness. Where Page offered empathy, Punk weaponized righteousness. He was a man of conviction who couldn’t stomach contradiction, and Page, in all his anxious, fragile truth, was contradiction made flesh.
To Page, AEW had become sacred not because it was perfect, but because it was trying. A space for the misfits, the strugglers, the ones who didn’t know how to be stars but knew how to bleed for something honest. Punk threatened that with the slow drip of moral certainty that choked the vulnerability AEW had been built on.
So Page stood across from him, not as a challenger, but as a protector. He did cut that promo. The one that broke kayfabe just enough to matter, not to the audience, but to CM Punk. The one that invoked 'workers' rights' and shattered the unspoken pact between performers. On its surface, it was a line about labor, about the kind of man who shows up, does the work, and bleeds for the locker room.
But underneath, it was a blade aimed at something deeper: the all but certain rumor that CM Punk, upon arriving with all his clout and legacy, had used his influence to push his former friend and Dark Order member, Colt Cabana out of AEW’s orbit. Page didn’t name Cabana. He didn’t need to. The words hung in the air like smoke over a battlefield. A callout dressed in principle. And Punk, for all his history of crossing lines, couldn’t stomach being crossed himself.
So Punk blew it up. Weeks later, he sat in the middle of the ring, holding a microphone, and called out Adam Page, knowing full well that Page wasn’t in the building. He called him a coward. "This isn’t cowboy shit, this is coward shit," he said, with a smirk that made it clear he wasn’t building a story, he was settling a score. Page didn’t respond. Couldn’t. He wasn’t booked on the show.
And so he said nothing. He vanished. But something in him cracked. Not because of the insult, but because of the betrayal of trust. Because you weren’t supposed to use the mic to take aim at ghosts. You weren’t supposed to swing at someone who couldn’t swing back. Punk broke the code, not by being cruel, but by being calculating. And Page, who had once spoken out of instinct and fear, now chose silence. But it was the kind of silence that hollows.
And then, he lost to Punk in the main event of Double or Nothing 2022, with the AEW World Championship on the line and the weight of months of tension between them coiled around every move, Adam Page fell. Not because he was outwrestled but because he hesitated. He held the belt in his hands, saw Punk vulnerable, and froze. Not out of fear. Out of principle. Out of confusion. Out of a belief, however faint, that he had to be better than the man he stood across from.
And that hesitation cost him everything. It broke something in him. And what it broke, it didn’t give back.
Then came the turning point for Adam Page and AEW. The company that had once stood as a sanctuary for misfits and storytellers, built on the promise of trust and transparency, watched that foundation split in real time.
It all happened at the All Out 2022 media scrum. After unifying the AEW World Championship in a match against Jon Moxley, CM Punk didn’t celebrate. He didn’t even reflect. He tore into AEW. He tore into Adam Page. Sitting beside Tony Khan, shirt off, blood still drying, he dismantled the curtain.
He called Page an empty-headed dumb f*ck. He said he worked with children. He chewed on a muffin and tore through the locker room. It wasn’t a promo. It was a purge.
When confronted backstage, things turned physical. Punches were thrown. Legal threats were made. Suspensions were handed out. Titles were stripped. And the company that had once promised a different way of doing things suddenly looked like every other promotion that ever collapsed under the weight of ego and power.
And Page? He wasn’t there. Again. He simply watched as the fire spread from a spark he had lit in a promo meant to protect his friend, not destroy a company. And as AEW burned from the inside, its emotional center, the anxious millennial cowboy who had once carried its soul, fell silent.
The company stopped knowing who it was the moment its heart went quiet. And neither did Page.
When Adam Page came back, he didn’t come back to redeem. He came back to destroy. The feud with Swerve Strickland didn’t begin as hate. But it became it. What started as competition turned into something darker. Something personal, vicious, consuming.
Swerve wasn’t just another rising star. He was everything Page had once imagined himself to be: fearless, magnetic, adored. On the surface, they were polar opposites: Swerve, draped in danger and swagger, moving with the sharp confidence of a man who had already written his future; Page, weathered and wounded, dragging his past like an anchor behind him. Swerve entered every arena like he owned it. Page entered like he might be told to leave.
But what cut deepest wasn’t their differences. It was that Swerve didn’t seem to carry the same doubt that had eaten Page alive. He was violent and calculating, charismatic and cold, but he was never unsure. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t question his worth. He didn’t second-guess whether he belonged. And that was what gnawed at Page like nothing else. Because in Swerve’s certainty, he saw everything he had once tried to become and everything he had failed to sustain.
The feud turned brutal because it had to. Page wasn’t fighting a man. He was fighting a phantom, the version of himself that never blinked, never broke, never lost faith. And that phantom had Swerve’s face. That was the cruelty of it: the hatred Page brought into the ring wasn’t just for his opponent. It was for the life he couldn’t reclaim.
Swerve called him out. Questioned his relevance. Dismissed his past. And Page, already hollowed out by failure and silence, answered not with words but with fury. The matches between them were horrifying. In their Texas Death Match, Page wrapped barbed wire around his fist and punched until it bled. In another, he stapled a wanted poster to Swerve’s face. And then came the Lights Out steel cage match at All Out 2024, a bout so unhinged it felt less like a wrestling match and more like an exorcism. Page didn’t just want to beat Swerve. He wanted to erase him.
In the end, Page hit Strickland with a steel chair until the hinges screamed. Then, with the crowd teetering between awe and horror, Page reached down and ripped the diamond-studded grill from Strickland’s mouth. Page pulled a hypodermic needle. Without ceremony, he shoved it through Swerve’s mouth and out through his cheek. Blood mixed with saliva, silence gave way to gasps. And then, as if possessed by the last breath of something human inside him, Page raised the chair again and brought it down on Swerve’s head so hard the steel broke into pieces on impact.
The match ended in stillness. And in that stillness, Hangman Page stood victorious yet but unrecognizable.
It was in his rivalry where Adam Page turned heel. No, not heel. Adam Page turned inward. This wasn’t the villainy of old wrestling tropes. This was something quieter. Something lonelier. He stopped trying to be good. He stopped trying to be anything.
The absence spoke louder than any promo. It said: I no longer believe there’s something to come back to.
But nothing stays still in wrestling. Belief, like pain, returns in cycles.
And on July 12, 2025, in front of a storm-drunk crowd at All In: Texas, Adam Page walked to the ring not as a hero reborn, but as a man who no longer needed saving. The match was a Texas Death Match against Jon Moxley, the chaos engine of AEW, and Page didn’t come for a coronation. He came for a reckoning.
Barbed wire. Broken glass. Forks. Chains. Blood. More blood. Then more still. Moxley summoned every demon he knew. The Death Riders swarmed. Will Ospreay tried to help, Bryan Danielson returned to aid. And then, through smoke and metal and screams, Swerve Strickland appeared.
Swerve, the man who nearly broke Page months earlier, handed him a chain.
And Hangman took it.
Because redemption never arrives clean. Sometimes it wears the face of your former tormentor. Sometimes the person who hated you most hands you the means to survive. Sometimes, salvation comes late and dressed like revenge.
With that chain, Page choked Moxley unconscious. Not for hatred. Not for dominance. But because he had nothing left to prove to anyone but himself.
When the bell rang, Page was World Champion again.
Not because he believed in himself.
Because this time, he no longer needed belief to fight.
And that’s where we leave him. Not because the story ended. The story never ends in professional wrestling. But we leave this story still, with a man so earnest, so talented, so beloved, swallowed whole by the quiet storm of self-doubt. A man who stood at the center of the ring not as a hero, not as a villain, but as something far more fragile: a reflection. Of anxiety. Of longing. Of a generation raised to feel too much and trust too little.
Hangman Page is AEW’s narrative thread, the beating heart whose every doubt and triumph reflected what the company aspired to be. He isn’t its hero. He isn’t its top guy. He is its story.
Adam Page embodies the struggle, the vulnerability, the fragile hope that defines AEW at its best. When he rose, the company felt like a place where stories could breathe and wrestlers could bleed honestly. When he faltered, the whole promotion seemed to stutter in rhythm.
And maybe that’s why it still aches. Because his journey didn’t end in ruin. It just kept going. A new reign. Another title. But the same man, still wondering if he deserves to hold it.
The cowboy walks. And we still don’t know if he believes what we see.
