It has been a long road back for Brian Cage. The former Impact Wrestling World Champion worked his last match for the promotion in January but had to take over four months off due to a torn biceps.
At AEW Double or Nothing in May, Cage finally got to make his debut and has immediately been established as a top heel in the promotion. He was scheduled to face Jon Moxley for the AEW World Championship at Fyter Fest but Moxley was pulled due to his wife, Renee Young, testing positive for COVID-19.
Now the wait is over. Cage will challenge Moxley for the title tonight on AEW Fight for the Fallen.
Signing as a free agent with AEW back in January, Cage explained why he made the decision to go to AEW in new comments to Mike Beauvais of TSN.ca.
“There were multiple factors,” Cage told TSN of his decision to sign with AEW. “I think just overall, it was the cool, new thing that everybody wants to be a part of, obviously, but to be able to break through the reach I’d already done – the Ring of Honor crowd, the Impact crowd and so on – and I felt like I needed to go to a bigger, national scene like an AEW. And another big thing was AEW had the most unique, cooler [potential] matches, if you will, and all of them would be first-time ever matches, whereas everywhere else would have been repeats and not as exciting. And if I were to go to WWE, I wouldn’t have as much creative control. That, artistically speaking, was a big reason why. I’m going to go to a place where I can showcase my abilities and have the most fun, intriguing matches and I had more personal desire to go to AEW than anywhere else.”
Cage was so anxious to get back in the ring, he considered forgoing surgery on his torn biceps.
“You don’t have to get surgery on your bicep,” Cageexplained. “But aesthetically, and I’m a body guy, it would have messed up my arm. You could also lose up to 40 per cent of your strength in that arm, which would not be great as far as lifting-wise and move set-wise. I was too eager and impatient and I didn’t want to be sidelined. Plus, I was thinking well, if I can’t work, then I’m going to get my contract rescinded and be SOL. But [AEW president] Tony [Khan] was great. He said, ‘We’ll take care of you, don’t worry about it. We want you here. Don’t stress.’ That really made me think, okay, I’ll get it. So not only was that the better decision to make, had I rushed back, it would have been for no reason because the pandemic hit anyway.”
Cage, who works as a heel in a tandem with Taz, admitted he wants his time on the mic and he’s not the biggest fan of being a heel.
“I want to talk more,” Cage said. “I don’t wanna be the guy who just stands around. And, actually, I’m not the biggest fan of being a heel. Almost every wrestler likes to be a heel more than [a] face, but I prefer to be a face than a heel, which is, I think, more of a rarity. I think it’s more so because if you think of bigger heels, they often get painted in these big bully meathead roles. I just think that’s very one-dimensional and a little meh – a little vanilla to me. I’d much rather get over as a face and then turn heel.”
You can read Cage’s full comments to TSN at this link.
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