Hangman Page says Being The Elite really helped his wrestling journey and believes that's where it all started to click together.
Hangman Page has been a member of The Elite for years. Prior to that, he was a member of Bullet Club and Hangman actually says that it was not until he joined Bullet Club then he began to see himself making a living in wrestling.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Page says once Being The Elite really took off as a YouTube show, he began to believe that he would do more than make a living.
“I think for me that was maybe one of the biggest, if not the biggest, thing to happen to me positively in my career, was not even wrestling, it was getting to be on Being The Elite,” said Page. “Because I talked earlier about like, wanting to go to school, not because I wanted to make movies, but, because I wanted to dick around my friends and make videos, and that's what that was! We did a story on BTE where I was kidnapped by WWE and we started we'd start doing the ‘Where's Hangman' bit. We filmed a bunch of bits of like just random people at a PWG show or whatever, going ‘Where's Hangman,’ or whatever. I remember Hunter at Ring of Honor, asking, I think the Bucks about like, ‘Hey, what's this all like, what's all this Where's Hangman stuff? People think he's missing?’ He didn't really know exactly what was going on and they filled them in. They were like, ‘We have to use this on the show, like the pay per view we're gonna do, because he's supposed to be missing.’ I couldn't just be at the pay-per-view if I'm supposed to be missing. Yeah, so he did the whole bit where like, came out my hands duct-taped together and stuff by WWE and it got a huge reaction. I had gone to OfficeMax or whatever the hell and had a bunch of like missing posters, you know, printed up and had like, the little tabs at the bottom where you pull for how to report me if you saw me or whatever, and posted them all over the arena. People were grabbing them and trying to get them signed, that kind of stuff. That was one of the first things I did that, I was just having so much fun doing that, and I thought like, ‘Man, this is it. This is what I want to do. BTE was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It wasn't just a YouTube show. It felt like a movement.
“I felt like we would do these indie shows, or Ring of Honor shows, or whatever. [Fans] were more interested in what we were doing on BTE, than anything above and beyond. That's when I kind of felt like we were on to something,” he continued. “It felt like we were really onto something and there's no way this is not going to continue to get bigger. I don't know how much bigger I wouldn't have imagined this bigger. But something special is happening, and I'm going to do a little bit more than make a living at this.”
Hangman also explained that regardless of the intention of The Elite or Ring of Honor, BTE became a huge source of fans' interest for Ring of Honor as a whole.
“It felt like you were on the inside of something like you watch the 10 or 15-minute YouTube show. It was something you knew that we took time out of our actual schedule, what we're supposed to be doing, to make the stuff and we had a connection, you know what I mean? People were having fun trying to give that back to us,” Hangman said. “It was weird. Because like for a while there, it felt like, for better or worse, whether they wanted it to be or not, or whether we wanted it to be or not, it felt like Ring of Honor was really about BTE. That was a real turning point for me at least mentally and figuring out how long this would last for me.”
These days, Hangman is the AEW World Champion and even though he's no longer a regular on BTE with his friends, he now gets to fight with his friends. Adam recently defeated Adam Cole in a Texas Death Match to retain his title on the April 15 AEW Rampage.
Now, AEW CEO Tony Khan has also purchased ROH. Recently, Tony proclaimed he's had talks with WarnerMedia about ROH's future. Tony also says he will book Ring of Honor moving forward.
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