Insight into Christian Cage’s latest run.
Guest appearing on the newest edition of Insight with Chris Van Vliet is two-time AEW TNT Champion Christian Cage. The conversation featured a lengthy discussion about Cage’s run in All Elite Wrestling and how it came to be.
Along the way, he was asked how much longer does he want to continue wrestling. Cage turned 50 years old in late 2023. He said he’d continue wrestling until it was no longer fun. He added that he thinks he has three years left on his current deal with AEW and he’ll see what happens regarding his future after this contract ends.
I always said that I would do it till it wasn’t fun, and that was my barometer on it so, how can I not be having fun right now? It’s still fun, it’s still fun. I have no timeline, I signed a contract. I think I have another three years left on this contract so we’ll get to the end of that and then see what happens but you know, I feel like I have a lot of knowledge. I don’t know everything but I know a lot and I feel like I think (about) the business differently and I layout matches and I see matches differently than other people do. I would like to, at some point, when the time is right to obviously give back to the business that has done what it’s done for me.
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Cage was an entrant in the 2021 WWE men’s Royal Rumble. At some point after that, he received a call from Jon Moxley.
Moxley was very surprised that Cage was not signed to WWE, so he told him he should have a chat with AEW President Tony Khan and said he’d be an idiot not to. Cage received a text from Khan as Dynamite was on the air. The next day, they spoke on the phone for almost three hours and it was halfway through the conversation that Cage knew he was going to land in AEW.
I think we (myself & WWE) were back-and-forth a little bit and we never got as far as numbers or anything like that. I think it was more like scheduling stuff, like what I was willing to do and I think we were trying to get some traction there and a friend of mine, Jon Moxley, called me and we were talking and when he found out that I wasn’t signed, he was blown away by that and he said, ‘You should have a conversation with Tony Khan,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know…’ Well, he said, ‘You’re actually an idiot if you don’t.’ He said, ‘You hold all the cards here,’ and he said, ‘You have the ability to pick the stage where you finish your career. You should at least have a conversation, don’t you think?’ I said, ‘Yep,’ and I said, ‘If Tony wants to talk to me, I’d love to have a conversation with him…’ It was that day, it was a Wednesday so they were doing TV that day and when their show was on, I got a text from Tony. Yeah, saying, ‘Hey, how are you?’ I said, ‘I’m great. How are you?’ And he said, ‘Should we talk?’ And I said, ‘I think we should’ and so he called me the next day and we talked on the phone for almost three hours and halfway through that call, I knew AEW was the place for me and not only that, but working for a guy like Tony Khan. That’s basically how it all came to fruition was just from that one phone call and then we talked one other time later in the week and then that was it.
Looking back at his arrival to AEW as the promoted and hyped-up signing, Cage addressed sentiments from the public that it was overhyped. He wanted to make them eat their words.
He then spoke about his TNT Title run(s) and felt the belt was more prestigious, if not more prestigious than the World Championship when he had it.
And you know how wrestling fans are, right? Nothing’s ever good enough. So, when my name was announced (to be joining AEW), there were some people that were obviously, you know, thinking it was going to be somebody else, maybe hoping it was going to be somebody else. I mean, there were a lot of people that were happy it was me too. But, when you do something like that that’s not a surprise, when you hype something, you’re giving people the opportunity to have an opinion. Either good or bad and they’re gonna voice that after.
I heard all those things that were said after, that maybe it wasn’t big enough for the hype and all those sorts of things and when we were doing these press conferences after I took the TNT Championship which was basically thrown on the scrap heap and I revived that title to make it, at one point, and I’ll die on this hill, that it was as prestigious, if not more prestigious than the World Title when I had that run, and we’re main eventing a pay-per-view, WrestleDream with it and we were sitting in the scrum after and I had my opportunity to basically say there was people and there’s probably a lot of people in this room that thought that the signing was overhyped and I just wanted to make them eat their words.
Cage expressed that he feels he’s doing the best work of his career. In regards to his mic work, he does not tell anyone what he is going to say. He touched on the mentioning of wrestlers’ deceased father’s and said he does not know how all that came about.
I feel like it 100 percent (that I’m doing the best work of my career) … So, like I said, when I got my career back after being retired for seven years, it was a gift to get it back. But it wasn’t just enough to get it back for me and okay, I got it back, that’s great. Now it’s like, how far can we push it? How far can we go with it? I had seven years of lost time to make up for… Was I content with what I accomplished? Yes. But did I feel like I’d accomplished everything that I could accomplish? Not even close. So, the goal was even to prove at an advanced age that you can still go out there and do it if you apply yourself and you push yourself and it’s taking chances and risks too. Sometimes you have to go and do things that other people are unwilling to do to stand out and that’s what I’m doing.
I’ve never told anybody what I’m gonna say. Never had it cleared with anybody, never asked anybody. I just go out there and do it. It’s one of those things. You have to be willing to go places that others are unwilling to go in order to stand out, especially this day and age. I saw an opportunity that I could jump on and I took it and I rode it and sometimes things happen you’re not expecting to happen and I said one phrase and it turned into a wildfire and I just embraced it and ran with it.
Like I said, I don’t even know how this happened, it just did (he said about bringing up wrestlers’ deceased father’s). When a shark senses blood in the water, you attack it, so that’s what happened. I saw an opportunity in that and I attacked it. Like I said, the only way to stand out, to me, in this day and age is to be different and it’s hard to be different when a lot of things have been done or are being done, and it’s very much a copycat business. If something’s working, you see people start to do it and I’m seeing the influence that a lot of characters, not just on our show but on other shows as well. So when that happens, you start saying, okay, what I’m doing is working here.
At AEW Double or Nothing, Christian was part of the triple-header main events that were billed. He unsuccessfully challenged Swerve Strickland for the World Championship in the second to last match of the pay-per-view.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Insight with Chris Van Vliet with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
