McGuire’s Monday: Leaving AEW says more about the worker than it does the workplace

I still can’t stop thinking about Ethan Page’s words he decided to share with the always-civil, certainly-not-tribalistic pro wrestling world a couple weeks ago. For those who missed it, he was recently on Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson’s “Talk’n Shop” podcast – which I didn’t even know was still a thing – and he said this about going to WWE from AEW:

“I went from somewhere that was so chaotic and unorganized to a place that, I mean, I’m still learning because I’m still so new here, but this is a machine, and it’s incredible. It feels good to not feel like I have to do everything myself. To have people that want to see me succeed is kind of mind-blowing.”

Because I’m a big fan of choosing option C in these situations – “it’s not as hard as it sounds to just not say anything at all” – I rolled my eyes at yet another former AEW employee who left and had something not great to say about their former workplace. After that initial scoff, I started to think more about it and, as the first sentence said, I still find myself wondering about those words in different contexts.

It’s not always right away and it’s not always as explicit as Page’s quote, but for the people who never experienced the WWE machine and had spent significant time trying to help build AEW’s infrastructure before heading to Triple H’s playground, the difference in scenery appears stark. The underlying sentiment is consistent in that one side feels loosely directionless while the other is … well, it’s a machine (damn it!).

Ditto for wrestlers who have left AEW for pastures not related to WWE. Remember what Frankie Kazarian said when he bailed on being elite in the name of heading home to the Impact Zone? “It just became apparent to me that what I like, and what I appreciate about pro wrestling, and the way I like it presented was not happening at AEW,” Kazarian said on “The Kurt Angle Show.” “And that’s not an indictment on them. What they perceive as good television wrestling and what I do are different things, and the business model, everything.”

And then there’s CM Punk, who … oh, we don’t have to go over this again, do we?

It’s kind of fascinating. I tend to believe that when there’s smoke, there’s fire, and be it a post on whatever Twitter is called these days or a quip during a podcast interview or even some thinly veiled potshot on a competitor’s television program, the people who leave AEW (or, um, got fired from AEW) always leave with conviction. More often than not, they’re loud about it. And if they’re not loud about it, they make suggestions that half imply they wouldn’t mind being loud about it.

Look at what Jade Cargill said after Backlash earlier this year when she was asked about the differences between her former workplace and her current workplace: “When you have the machine behind you, you can’t lose. You can’t. Everybody backstage is so supportive. They want me to go out here, they want me to excel.” She’s not really saying anything there … or is she? Maybe? A little bit? Is there really no support behind the scenes at AEW? Only she can answer those questions, but to an outsider like me, those words felt tacit in nature.

It’s interesting because at this point, it says more about the employee than it does the employer – and I’m not even suggesting it’s necessarily a bad thing either way you look at it. If we have the ability to choose where we want to work and we can base that on our preferences for how we work, wouldn’t we all take that opportunity? Bryan Danielson wants to wrestle mat-based Pro (capital “P”) Wrestling (capital “w”) matches that almost always lead to someone bleeding. You think anyone in AEW is going to tell him he can’t do that? Jon Moxley wants to be known as the violence guy who isn’t scared of anything and has no patience for nonsense. The AEW fan base will probably appreciate that more than any other company’s fan base in the United States. So go be who you want to be, Mr. Moxley. Good for you for finding a place that will allow you to share your art in the exact ways you want to share your art.

The only problem with that is those examples aren’t the rules; they are the exceptions. Moxley and Danielson are two top guys, they’ve already been through the WWE machine and they’ve spent decades amassing fan bases who’ve long fallen in love with them and will continue to love them for as long as they lace up boots. What about Evil Uno? Lee Moriarty? Shoot, even Konosuke Takeshita, who is universally beloved by AEW’s fan base, but even he got a little snippy about the company and the way he’s being used in a recent interview. For wrestlers trying to find their footing in the business, AEW seems to be a mixed bag.

Sure, it’s great to work a GCW event one night and then appear as enhancement talent on a Ring of Honor taping the next – outside of popping up in WWE, the exposure is unparalleled, no matter how you cut it – but what happens next week when the circus has traveled to another market? It’s like being in a local cover band that once got to open for .38 Special. You were able to marginally brush up against a marginally reasonable facsimile of the Big Time, and yet you still had to get back to work delivering mail on Monday. And no, those guys ain’t calling you again the next time they play the state fair.

It all leads to this question: If you aren’t a top talent in AEW, how helpful of a workplace is it relative to the growth of your career? Tony Khan has gobbled up all the big names he could shake a Jaguars football at, and he’ll most likely continue to do so, so in the meantime, if you aren’t buds with some of the people who were there on Day 1 or aren’t an indie darling or don’t have the name identity of former WWE employees … well, it’s Rampage for you, pal, and you better not speak up about it because you wouldn’t want to go the way of the Hardys, now would you?

Of course, there are two sides to every story. I’m positive there are dozens of reasons for dozens of things happening to dozens of talents who are or are not at AEW anymore. That is information to which I will never be privy. But the optics of these departures – and the through line of the comments that always tend to lean towards calling the company either an organized shit show or a disorganized attempt at a Big Time Business – aren’t good. They suggest some version of a house of cards, one where things could go very wrong, very quickly, not unlike what happened when Noted Troublemaker CM Punk decided to go full CM Punk on the company. AEW clearly has a system of some sort; it’s just a system with heavy fragility that doesn’t always come across as fair, reliable or even desirable when you hear ex-employees talk about it.

Page’s case sticks with me because he was the one who, according to some social media posts a while ago, even offered to be a Ring of Honor guy just so he could work regularly. He went from being positioned in a prominent program with Dan Lambert to willingly saying, “OK, you have nothing for me? I’ll go put over other guys on a show people can only access on the Internet and is taped during hour nine of an 11-hour taping just because I want to get in the ring.” And even that guy – that guy! – ended up being someone Khan or the AEW/ROH braintrust didn’t want to do anything significant with.

Does any of this mean AEW is a terrible place to work? Of course not. It probably means that it’s not for everybody, though, and that’s OK, too. I’d just like to hear more from Takeshita … or Ricky Starks, who has been MIA … or Saraya, whose comeback somehow became an afterthought … or Action Andretti, who hit the lottery for a week, only to have to give the money back in due time … or Miro, because what’s his deal, anyway? … or … or … or anyone else who works for AEW, doesn’t seem fulfilled at AEW and might be interested in shedding light on why they aren’t fulfilled at AEW.

Because while the grass isn’t always greener no matter which side of the fence you’re on, there are always areas of the soil where it can grow easier, faster and taller than other spots on the playing field.