Samoa Joe’s experience, strength, technical ability, and brutality makes him unlike anyone else in All Elite Wrestling. Nobody knows this better than Hangman Adam Page.
“It’s like wrestling a fridge,” Page explains, with a hint of nervous laughter. “You can’t really pick up a fridge. Like, maybe you can pick up a fridge for a second or two, but you can’t really handle a fridge.”
That “fridge” will be waiting for Hangman inside a steel cage on Saturday at Full Gear, trying for the second time in two months to pry the AEW World Championship from Page’s waste, albeit in very different circumstances to when the two met at WrestleDream in October.
Hangman Page has noticed something different since the two wrestlers met for that last match. The anger, desperation, and tactics Joe has reverted to have added new stakes to their return match at Full Gear, with Page blaming Jon Moxley and The Death Riders for waking Joe’s violent side.
“Once I defeated Joe at WrestleDream, I got the sense that he was disappointed in himself,” Page told SB Nation. “One on one, when he had to challenge me, he couldn’t get it done. Everything that he had fought for all year had been for the ability and the right for guys like himself to get a fair shot at this championship — and he had earned that. He earned a championship match against me, and to know that everything that he had fought for wasn’t in his favor, he still wasn’t able to do it.”
“I think now that he has started to rely on some of the same tactics that they [Death Riders] used against him throughout the year.”
There’s palpable frustration in how Hangman talks about the involvement of Will “Powerhouse” Hobbs and Katsuyori Shibata in recent weeks. It’s for this reason that Hangman decided to make their match at Full Gear a cage match, to keep the rest of The Opps locked out in hopes of ensuring the championship would be settled 1v1. It was a rash decision, fueled by this frustration, but Page isn’t thinking too much about that, “No second thoughts” he says confidently, when asked about the move to lock himself inside a cage with Joe — but that’s par for the course when it comes to how Page approaches wrestling. As a champion he always looks forward, never back, and relies on that confidence in his gut decisions to put him on the right path — even when they seemingly don’t make sense.
“He definitely overlooked me,” Page says of their first match. “I think that a recurring theme throughout my time in AEW is other wrestlers, other people overlooking or discounting who I am and what I’m capable of because of something that they may not like about me.” That isn’t the case this time. Samoa Joe, for all his accomplishments and legacy in professional wrestling simply doesn’t have the same resume as Page when it comes to their careers in AEW — and Hangman wants that to be known. “I’ve achieved more than he has here in AEW.”
When we last spoke in May ahead of Double or Nothing a pensive Page was talking about his need to turn over a new leaf, to unburden himself from some of the emotion he’d saddled himself with. A categoric need to become more efficient by not falling into the pitfalls of taking the bait. It’s something that has largely been successful for him in his second championship run — but making the cage match stipulation for Full Gear was somewhat of a misstep. While it certainly allows Page to ensure that The Opps won’t get involved, it also means he is trapped with one of the most violent men in professional wrestling, and Page loses whatever edge he had in speed or athleticism as a result.
“I can see that argument,” Page says, when I suggest he’s hurting himself with this stipulation. “As smart and as wily as he [Joe] can be, I’ve managed to surpass that, exceed that, work around it. That’s ultimately what this comes down to, and I think the advantage is in my favor there, when it’s just the two of us.”
Naturally Page’s full focus is on retaining the AEW World Championship, but it’s impossible to ignore the rest of the card — especially when you’re effectively the figurehead of the company as champ, and even more so when Kenny Omega and Jurassic Express are facing off with The Young Bucks and Josh Alexander.
“As champion I pay more attention,” he says, “I page more attention to the rest of the roster, what’s going on, throughout the entire show, because I know that when I’m done with whatever I’m doing at the moment, one of them could be next in front of me.”
Instead of looking ahead, I asked Hangman Page to look backwards. Picking the mind of the champ meant finding out which historical figure he would wrestle if given the chance.
“Abraham Lincoln maybe was a wrestler, maybe, I don’t know, but he had good size. It would be interesting to see what was happening in wrestling, in his time and what the hell that would be like. I would imagine he wears his hat the entire time. So maybe the goal of the match is to try to Buckshot the hat off of him.”
The other person Hangman would wrestle: The Devil. Not MJF, but actual, legitimate, Satan himself. For now, he’ll just have to look ahead to Samoa Joe in the cage, and keeping his title. That will be challenge enough.
AEW Full Gear airs Saturday night live on pay-per-view, starting at 8 p.m. ET.
