Swerve Strickland talks 'Hangman' Adam Page.
Throughout the past couple of months, Swerve Strickland and Adam Page have been engaged in a heated feud that has set the world of wrestling on fire. As it currently stands, Strickland holds two singles victories over Page. The third singles bout between the duo, which took place on the February 7 edition of Dynamite, went to a draw. Strickland and Page also competed against Samoa Joe in a three way match for the AEW World Championship at Revolution, but Joe was able to win that match.
While speaking to Fightful for a new interview, Swerve Strickland talked about a variety of topics related to Page, starting with their feud and how it came together.
"I honestly didn’t know where we were going to start, what was the baseline. Will Washington came up with the idea of, ‘Hey, we don’t know where you’re going following Wembley, but I have an idea of what I want to do with Swerve. I think you two right now, we need to get Hangman back in them singles—’ ‘Cause he was doing trios. ‘—We need to get you back into singles and you need a counterpart.’ We all consider Hangman, he’s the main character of AEW. I was like, ‘Okay, we need to put him in turmoil.’ The elements that I have brewing in my head of ideas I can do to manipulate, touch on that, play with that, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah. I can use a lot of elements.’ Because he was so pure. To me it was pure water and adding iodine into it. The whole thing is just starting to turn and slowly take over the entire glass of water. That’s what I wanted. To me, that’s how characters are truly defined—what elements of another character is going to alter the show. It alters a character, a main character. It shifts the tempo and the mood and the theme. So now my music when it comes out is a positive thing, but there’s dark elements coming behind it. So it’s like Nana is luring you in to a false sense of security. ‘Oh, Nana’s here... Oh, God, wait, then there’s this other guy coming behind you that’s just trespassing and going to Buddy Wayne's Wrestling School and going into Hangman’s house. That was the point of those things."
Strickland went on to talk about how he has been reflecting on his evil actions as of late.
"It’s like a candy coated painting of things. Hangman is the elements of ‘I’m dragging you down to hell, we’ll see who comes out at the end of it.’ It seems like we both came out, but somebody came out differently. So I came out of it, ‘Oh, man. I think this evil, this resentment I’m holding inside of me is holding me back from achieving my goals.’ ‘Cause if you noticed, when I started doing that, the International title? I had it, lost it. The Continental Classic? I had it, I lost it. The TNT title opportunity. I had it and I lost it. The AEW World Title? I had it and I lost it. I was like, ‘Is this evil worth it?’ So now I’m kind of understanding, which goes back to the promo I cut this past week on TV. Am I supposed to play this role of the guy that gets close enough, but can’t get it done? Or maybe this is karma from all the bad I was doing. Maybe it’s what got me to there, but something more is gonna have to get me over the hump."
Strickland then went on to discuss his Texas Deathmatch with Adam Page, which is a match that many people think will go down in history. Strickland singled out specific elements of that match and talked about them in detail.
"At the time all you’re trying to do is make sure that certain points of the match are laid out that people understand it. I wanted to make sure it reads properly to the audience live and people watching at home. I want to make sure they understand the motive of why we are doing what we are doing. You don’t want to just see two guys just bludgeoning each other with objects because anybody can do that. You can get anybody without a feud, without a rivalry, you can get two guys in there to do that. I wanted to make sure all the weaponry made sense for why we were doing this. Like the staples got pulled out, he wasn’t trying to beat me. Hangman wasn’t trying to beat me for the first while. He was just trying to hurt me. He’s trying to hurt me. He wasn’t trying to get this match over with. He wants this to go a while because he wants to pay back all those things that I was doing and he has the freedom to do it. I can’t run. I can’t go anywhere. So he has me. Then the staples was to also signify the child’s picture that I ripped off the refrigerator when I came in. He wanted to put it back on my face. Then he was just so infuriated with rage that he’s going as far as drink my blood and spit it out in the air because he wants a part of me. He wants me to not forget this. It’s almost violating another man in a sense. I violated his home, he’s violating me. I was like, ‘This is a lot of blood. This is an awful lot of blood.’ That’s all I was really thinking about. ‘This is a whole lot of blood.’ I still have to run and move and fight and hopefully I can see, because I could barely even see ‘cause it was just so much. I had never bled that much in my life. For a little bit. It’s easy to go into shock and have anxiety. You’re not supposed to witness your blood leaving your body so much. It’s not supposed to fountain out. But I was just like, ‘Okay, stay calm. You’re okay. Your breathing is good. You’re not hyperventilating and you’re not getting light headed. You’re good.’ Then I go outside, piledriver on the barricade. I was like, ‘Okay, it’s still going. It’s still going. It won’t stop going.’ So like, water bottle and then it coagulated a little bit so the blood just became sticky. But my wrist bands were whole white and by the end of the match, they were like red gauntlets. ‘Cause I just kept wiping my face. It was so bad. It just got to a point where I fell down to the mat and I just wiped my face on the mat because there was nothing else to wipe my face off of. It was a horrific, beautiful masterpiece. The ending of all these elements of Nana, Brian Cage, just to remind people that I’m still a bad guy and I still want to take the underhanded way. I need help. Help me. Somebody help me. You can’t. You gotta keep these guys away from each other for a while."
Strickland then went on to chat about the previously mentioned three way bout at AEW Revolution.
"It’s also a distraction, ‘cause I want to beat him. So it distracted me from Joe. Could I beat Joe? We don’t know. We still don’t know that. Did I ever have Joe beat? We don’t know. But I had Hangman beat again. There’s the devil you know and the devil you don’t know. I know I can beat Hangman. So why wouldn’t I go for Hangman, a guy that I’ve beaten twice already? Almost a third time. So, of course I’m going to go for that guy, but he’s also distracting ‘cause you can’t leave your back turned to Samoa Joe, which is what happened in the finish of that match."
Fans can check out Fightful's full interview with Swerve Strickland in the video linked at the top of this article.
Furthermore, check out more of Fightful's interviews by visiting our YouTube channel.
