AEW/ROH star Ethan Page recently spoke with Jackson Bragman on the Bragman Breakdown on a number of topics including his decision to move to ROH.
Page said, “It was honestly, it was when I was with the Hardy Boys. To me, I’m like, ‘this is a dream come true.’ I get to do the dance, I get to come out to the entrance, I’m legitimately good friends with Isiah Kassidy so I get to work with him and we were teaming, but so irregularly. We had pitched to be the Moan Event, because he was doing the moaning thing and we were kind of doing nothing at the time. The goal was to eventually get to the point where I could be released from my contract with Matt Hardy. We lost in the match at his house, in the big compound fight and he ends up controlling my contract and The Firm needed to disband, which I felt like at that point was a great point to end the storyline, but a week or two later, I had to team up with The Firm again. I feel there were too many loose ends that kind of gave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Once they started to see us together for longer, it was almost like it was white noise, and I didn’t want to be white noise on the show. For me, it was fun, I was learning so much. Literally, every week, I was learning from Matt and Jeff. They are legends. I just knew that if I kept going down this path, I would pretty much be stuck in the mud. I don’t want to be stuck in the mud for a long time. Once you get cold, it’s very hard to get hot.”
He also talked about getting to work with Matt Hardy.
“The craziest thing is. We were put on a majority of the YouTube shows. We were on Dark Elevation, so we were giving it away for free. Myself and Matt Hardy were telling a story on those shows every week and the crowd was going nuts. Every week, we were going to these arenas and they were so invested in this storyline. Once we got to the point of kind of finishing it on Rampage and the compound match, I feel that should have been the exclamation, and we could change gears and get to the next thing, but it felt like we were spinning our tires, playing these characters that I feel reached their maximum.”
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
