Jake Hager shoots on AEW: “F*ck Tony Khan – I could tell that he didn’t want me there”
Former AEW star Jake Hager announced earlier this month that he is leaving the wrestling business. During an interview with Chris Van Vliet, Hager commented on when he stopped loving wrestling…
“My first contract with AEW was up, and after that, the negotiation process was very one-way. I could tell that… well, anyways, I always find a way to say this every day, so I think everyone should too: F*ck Tony Khan. I could tell that he didn’t want me there. He offered me like a year and a half. I was like, ‘Bro, I just did Stadium Stampede twice. Don’t act like Stadium Stampede didn’t put AEW on the map. I was in the debut episode. I was the big spoiler. And you offered me 18 months after all that?'”
“So it was that, and the way he started running the business—it really felt like he wasn’t professional. After all the [CM] Punk sh*t that went down, the boys got together and we had a meeting—boys only, no office. Stings in there: Chris Jericho, Bryan, Mox, they’re all standing at the front kind of talking us through this sh*t. And lo and behold, who comes storming into the room? Daddy’s little billionaire, and he’s yelling at us because Dax and Cash Wheeler didn’t want to come in. They didn’t like the storyline, so they refused to come to TV that day. And he was like, ‘Listen, I’ll put you in a six-man six minutes before the show, and you’re gonna do it.’ And we’re all just feeling disrespected. I still, to this day, wish I would have stood up and said a lot of things, but he had just told Sting that he was going to put him in a six-man six minutes before the show—and then he was going to honor him for his retirement. We became his little playthings. We had to wait outside his office.”
“His storylines were very good at debuting, but he could never carry anything through. It got to the point where… I’m carrying on, but I couldn’t tell him anything. He couldn’t take criticism. He was f*cking up. And we were all just having to deal with it. We all had blood, sweat, and tears put into that company. We were all there at the beginning. We all had our careers behind us that helped build that company, and then we had to just sit side by side and couldn’t do anything because he wanted to run it the way he wanted to run it.”