Tommaso Ciampa: “AEW was head and shoulders where I wanted to be”
While speaking to BleacherReport.com, new TNT champion Tommaso Ciampa commented on his decision to leave WWE for AEW…
“AEW was head and shoulders where I wanted to be. I take everything pretty seriously when it comes to doing it by the book. And with my contract coming up the way it was, I was like, ‘Well, I can’t really have a conversation right now, so let me just wait this out.’
I did put the statement out a week early because I wanted to, one, see what the response was online and in the industry, and two, I wanted people to go, ‘Oh, so that weird report that came out a month ago, there’s some truth to that.’ So that was definitely on purpose.
When my wife and I had the conversation about what’s next, and obviously we’re done here with WWE and we’re going to move on and bet on ourselves and figure out this next chapter. A big conversation was AEW and how do I get there.
So we started to look at where they are after my contract is up and we saw Texas. Long story short, my wife for five years now has been eyeing up Blue Hill Ranch in Texas. It’s like this giraffe safari where you get to have all these awesome animal experiences. And we just never had the time to come out there.
So I was like, ‘Why don’t we just book a family vacation, and if things happen to work out and we can shock the world and show up two days later, we’re a two-hour drive away. And if it doesn’t work out, we still have this awesome family vacation.’
And sure enough, it worked out fast. Tuesday I had a couple of quick conversations with QT Marshall and RD Evans, who used to work with me in ROH. We always had great chemistry and he’s a writer now.
This thing for worked out extremely fast. Faster than I would have ever guessed. I met Tony [Khan] for the first time Wednesday. His passion is contagious. His love for his roster, his fanbase, for AEW is just beaming off him. So we had a very quick conversation and it just felt really right.”