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Adam Page talks Ring of Honor 16th Anniversary Show, Supercard of Honor, more

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Adam Page from Ring of Honor joins the podcast to talk about this weekend’s ROH 16th Anniversary Show, the April 7 Supercard of Honor, and the recent tensions in Bullet Club.

Transcript

Adam Page Credit RING OF HONOR Patty McCarthy
Adam Page
RING OF HONOR/Patty McCarthy

On recent tensions between Bullet Club leaders Kenny Omega and Cody:
“We’re not coming apart at the seams. We’re fine. Bullet Club is fine. Look, we’re a group of the most entertaining, athletic, all-around best wrestlers on the planet. And, you know, you’re just going to have a little bit of a rift sometimes. But, it’s fine, things are fine. We’ll work it out. This one is really just a little disagreement between Cody and Kenny, and they have a match coming up, and once that’s over, we’re fine. OK? Just got to get it out of our system.”

On the upcoming 16th anniversary show match between The Hung Bucks and SoCal Uncensored: 
“When we have these kind of stipulation matches, myself, Matt and Nick, we tend to go a little nuts. We tend to go all out. I don’t know if you saw stuff from this past weekend, but the match wasn’t even necessarily supposed to be so crazy, so violent. You know, when the pressure is on, when you have a big match, when you’ve got that opportunity, we go nuts. So, it should be a spectacle, an absolute spectacle.”

Page’s beginnings in the wrestling business:
“I started wrestling in high school. I started training to be a wrestler at 15, and I was doing shows every weekend when I was 16. So, my junior and senior year of high school, I was a pro wrestler. These were small shows. They were not making me any money, or if I was making money, it wasn’t much. They certainly weren’t making me a profit. But it was something that I was enjoying. I went to college. I had my dad kind of push me to do that, and where I came from, it’s just what people did. You went to high school, then you went to college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I majored in communications because I liked video editing. I had no idea what I was planning to do when I got out. I had a quick education in high school, I had a lot of college credits, so I got through Virginia Tech in two years with a bachelor’s, and while I was at Tech, I was still wrestling every weekend. I think then I realized, maybe I’m kind of good at this, maybe enough to one day make a living at it. So I started going to these Ring of Honor camps and stuff, and started working for Ring of Honor not long after college. I was a high school teacher for a little while, but I quit teaching because I was so busy wrestling, and it consumed me completely.”

Does his background in communications help as a wrestler?
“I never thought that I’d be going to Virginia Tech to study communications, studying film-making, and then I’d be working on a YouTube series that would somehow make me very popular. So, yeah, man, all that stuff has translated well. Bullet Club and us guys, we are merchandise machines, so I’m constantly pitching stuff for merchandise for me, for other people, whatever. Lending a hand on Being the Elite, I’m not the editor, but if we get in a situation where it’s, how can we do this, I’m kind of the person who knows, I know how we can do that. That’s just kind of where I ended up.”

The recent surge in popularity for Ring of Honor, New Japan:
“Ring of Honor and New Japan have always been building. We’re in a constant state of building. If you look at Ring of Honor’s history, it’s constantly building. We’re having, this past year, the biggest crowds we’ve ever had. I know Supercard of Honor in April is already our biggest crowd ever even before the doors have opened. I don’t know if it’s sold out completely, I don’t know if they’re opening up more seats, I’m not really sure, but I know it’s already our biggest crowd ever. So, we’re doing record numbers. We’re getting Honor Club started, we’re getting our streaming service for televisions and iPhones, that will be soon. We’re constantly building, and you have to. This is a very special time for that. Ring of Honor and New Japan are really kind of hitting their stride here, and it’s become a bit of a pop-culture phenomenon, too. So this, yeah, an amazing time in wrestling, and I think everybody in wrestling knows, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t be in it.”

On Page’s upcoming match with Jay White for the IWGP U.S. title:
“This is big for me. This is the only singles title shot I’ve had in New Japan. It is only the second singles match I’ve ever had for New Japan, which may sound surprising. So, this is something new for me, this is something big for me. But, this is something I feel like I’m prepared for better than Jay White has ever been prepared for. Because I’ve been doing this kind of thing for the past 11 years. And this is on my turf. This is in America. I’m excited about it. I think it should be excellent, it should be violent, it should be vicious, because I’m willing to do next to anything for that United States championship, because that means the world to me.”

What it was like to perform in front of the big crowd at Wrestle Kingdom 12:
“I don’t know, what was it like? It’s just, you’re there, it’s surreal. You come out to the ramp, you’ve seen the building before, but you know it’s still going to surprise you, and it still does. It’s just a ton of people, man, and it’s cool, it’s a cool feeling. And you have to stop every now and then and take it in, because we do this every weekend. It might not be 30,000 every weekend. Maybe 3,000. But still, what we do isn’t normal, but it does quickly become normal. If you become jaded, you don’t take it in. But you do have to mentally tell yourself to just stop a second, look around, because this doesn’t last forever, man. Take it in.”

On the April 7 Supercard of Honor
“Yeah, that should be huge. We’ve got a heckuva main event, the biggest Ring of Honor show in history. I don’t have a match yet, for sure, but I guess it will be kind of dependent on things that happen this coming weekend with the six-man title defense. I don’t know past SoCal who would be the next challengers. So, I’m not sure what I’ll be doing there. I can guarantee you that I will go all out and go all in, whoever it is.”

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