In just a few days, Tommasso Ciampa’s wrestling career got turned upside its head, as he left WWE after a decade in the promotion in order to sign with AEW, and promptly won the AEW TNT Championship in his first match with the promotion. But if all of that seems like a whirlwind, it was even more so for Ciampa.
Appearing on “SHAK Wrestling” one day after his first AEW appearance on “Dynamite” and a few days before winning the TNT Championship, Ciampa went through the emotions of his AEW debut. He admitted that, in the past, he had questioned those who wondered if fans would remember them upon debuts, only to find himself feeling the exact same emotion during the day, something that only passed as he began to make his entrance.
“I’m really, in real time, able to just take everything in and listen and be in the moment,” Ciampa said. “And I’m in the silhouette, and I can feel ‘Alright, right now they’re just reacting because this looks cool.’ Then Psycho Killer comes up, and I’m like ‘I think about 30% of them can connect the dots on this,’ because I haven’t used Psycho Killer on a public stage in 12 years. And then the name and the lights hit, and it rocked me to my core.
“It was one of those, like…I mean, it blew me away. It genuinely blew me away. And then the aftermath, the reception online, interviews, text messages from my peers, from fans, everything has just been overwhelmingly positive, which is nuts, because we are so used, we being all the performers in this industry, are so used to it being, at the very best, 50-50, at the very best. So to get this 99% positive response has just been like ‘Wait, what?’ Like, I want to take it. I’ll take it, because I know it’s going away, so I’ll take it. But holy crap. Unbelievable.”
