Jake Hager Claims Tony Khan Stormed Into All AEW Talent Meeting After CM Punk Situation

Jake Hager claims Tony Khan stormed into an all talent meeting after a CM Punk situation.

Earlier this month, Jake Hager announced that he was retired from pro wrestling and had been running his own trucking company. This came after his AEW contract was not renewed in June of last year.

While speaking to Insight With Chris Van Vliet, Hager was asked when he began to fall out of love with wrestling, which led the former JAS member to criticise AEW’s Tony Khan for how he handled situations.

“It was the second Blood & Guts we did in Vegas. It was against, uh, Daniel Bryan and Cesaro and those guys, and then Sammy jumped off the cage. My first contract with AEW was up, and after that we were like 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 to say fuck 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. Like 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 offer me 18 months after all that? So it was that and the way that he started running the business that it really, like he wasn’t a professional. Like we- like after all the Punk shit that went down, the boys got together and we had a meeting and this was the boys only, no office, right? We’re all like- Stings in there, (Big) Show, Jericho, Bryan, Mox, they’re all standing at the front kind of like talking us through this shit and lo and behold, who comes into the room storming in? Daddy’s little billionaire. He’s like yelling at us because I think it was Dax and Cash, Cash and 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 going to do it.’ and we’re all feeling disrespected. I still to this day, wish I would have stood up and said a lot of things, but like you just told Sting that you’re going to put him in a six man and six minutes, but then you’re going to honor him for his retirement? We became his little play things. We had to wait outside his office, his storylines were very good at debuting, but he can never carry anything through and it got to the point where- I’m carrying on, but it got to the point where I couldn’t tell him anything. He couldn’t take criticism. He was fucking 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. Then we all 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.”

Elsewhere in the same interview, Hager spoke about John Cena refusing to put him over. You can read more about that here.

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