Amitai Winehouse of The Athletic released a piece about Swerve Strickland, who is days away from working a triple threat match at AEW Revolution this Sunday against Hangman Page and World Champion Samoa Joe.
AEW President Tony Khan was quoted as noting that he tried to sign Strickland when AEW first launched in 2019, but he was signed to WWE at the time.
“After his (Swerve Strickland’s) first match against Tony Nese on AEW Rampage, Chris Jericho walked back to me and said, ‘This guy is really amazing. Where did you find him?’ I’ve been watching him for years. I wanted to bring him into AEW when we first launched, but he had just been signed by WWE. Swerve is a wildcard. We saw that Swerve is a breakout star. He won the Tag Team Championship in his first year and went on to have a massive 2023 while being showcased as a singles star. The idea was to showcase Swerve in feature positions with the intent and belief that crowds all over the world would buy into him. I believed he’d become very popular.”