Chris Van Vliet welcomed NXT Champion Ethan Page as his guest this week on “INSIGHT.” Ethan talked about Shawn Michaels, leaving AEW, Joe Hendry, and several other topics.
Ethan Page on winning the NXT Championship:
“I guess it is a record. If I’m wrong, it’s because that’s what I read on the internet that the fans were saying fastest championship. Vic Joseph was saying this to me that he thinks that I have the most PLE main events consecutively and the fastest amount. I’m on a really good run right now.”
‘It’s validating. I think that’s the perfect word, validating. It’s like, imagine your whole life you have this vision of what your potential could be, and no one around you sees the same vision as you. Then magically, the greatest wrestler of all time just has the same vision as you and is like, ‘I’ll let you do that’, and here I am doing it. Yeah, the boyhood dream, dude.”
On his first conversation with Shawn Michaels:
“It was hidden in one of these back rooms in this building, and essentially it was like, ‘Hey, I don’t know everything about you, but you seem like a guy that’s never been given a fair shot, so I’m gonna give it to you.’”
On leaving AEW:
“It was time. Yeah, it was time. I wasn’t getting what I magically got here, which was the opportunity to show what I bring to the table.”
Page on if he felt there was a time that he was too old to go to NXT:
“Dude, I feel old. I’m training with 20-year-old college athletes that are freaks of nature. That’s what this place is, breeding freaks of nature, and then here’s my broken down 34-year-old ass in training and working out with these guys looking around like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m the old guy now.’”
On the offer to come to NXT:
“I took all those independent dates, and I was just kind of betting on myself, trying to, I guess, get some upward momentum back into Ethan Page. I’m very big on following trends and patterns and I could tell that I was on a downward tick, and there wasn’t anything that was going to change there. So I had to kind of change my environment to be able to change my momentum. I booked up, maybe I’m over-exaggerating, but up close to 70 shows for the remainder of 2024 and I did a great wrestling show in Winnipeg. On my layover from Winnipeg to Detroit, because I was landing in Detroit to drive for Revolver Wrestling in Dayton, Ohio, I got a phone call. It was a number that I didn’t have on my phone. They were like, ‘Hi, is this Ethan Page? This is so and so from the WWE. We’d like to offer you a contract, this long, this amount’, and I’m just like, this is not real. I just go, ‘Honestly, that sounds fantastic.’ They hung up on me. My phone rings instantly. ‘Hi, this is so and so from WWE’, and I was like, ‘Whoa, wait, that phone call I just got was real?’ ‘Yea, and you agreed to everything, so we would like to email (the contract) to you and have it signed. I said, ‘Yea, send it over.’ I’m like, whoa, whoa. Then I’m calling my wife, ‘I think the WWE just offered me a job.’”
On his dream match in WWE:
“It’s probably Randy Orton. I mean he’s one of the best ever in the past 20 years here. How many more does he have? I don’t know. I mean, if I look at him, I’m gonna think a lot. He looks like a million dollars. He’s the guy. I mean, he’s the bar as far as how you want to be as a wrestler. He’s great. The Rock is obviously numero uno. I don’t know how many more matches he plans on having. I don’t know how many Ego’s Edges he has left in his career.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Chris Van Vliet with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
