AEW’s Jake Hager Recalls How He Became All Elite

Jake Hager’s run in AEW has served as a total reinvention for the former Jack Swagger, with Hager’s run as the quiet muscle of The Inner Circle seeing him used as a featured player on AEW TV over the past two years.

Speaking on the AEW Unrestricted podcast, Hager detailed how his signing with AEW came to be:

"It was August 2019 when the ink was dry on the contract,” started Hager. “It was during that summer. What happened was, Chris [Jericho] was training with my head coach Josh Rafferty. He's the head coach of all my camps. Chris was getting good training from him and they did a video package on Chris getting ready for his match at Double or Nothing. My training for MMA, I had (a fight) in May and we were running into each other all the time. We started talking, told him about getting into MMA to be a bigger star in pro wrestling, amongst other things. He dug what we were doing. I told him I had reached out and was like, 'Hey, are you interested?' and I hadn't heard anything, everybody wants to work for AEW. I think what happened was, Gallows and Anderson, possibly, were going to be in Inner Circle, but they re-signed (with WWE) so I got bumped up or came into the picture. However you want to phrase it, Chris told Tony [Khan] he wanted me for the job and the rest is history. Tony made sure I wasn't a scumbag, he had a couple of phone calls with me and I got to be elite.”

H/T: Fightful