Keeping it Kayfabe: Grappling with Hangman’s heel turn

It’s March 3, 2024. The venue is the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina. Up in the nosebleeds, my father, my two younger brothers, and I all sit side-by-side and watch “Hangman” Adam Page vie for Samoa Joe’s AEW World Championship.

The whole crowd is chanting, “Swerve’s House,” in support of the third man in the match, Shane “Swerve” Strickland. I’m part of the chant, dancing with Prince Nana as Swerve saunters to the ring and cheering every time Swerve squares up with Joe.

However, I simply cannot cheer when Swerve turns his attention to Hangman. I seem to be alone in this disposition, however, as I am the only man in my section cheering for the Anxious Millennial Cowboy.

Somewhere down toward the floor, a lone soldier starts chanting, “Cowboy Shit!” I refrain from joining in, not wanting to burn the ears of my Christian father, especially because my voice would stand out. No one in my area is willing to support Hangman, and within seconds, my comrade elsewhere in the arena is drowned out with boos.

My family has spent the past week questioning my devotion to Hangman Page over the objectively cool Swerve Strickland, and I think about it in the moment. Swerve is cool, and Hangman is being a bit whiny, but overall, I side with Hangman because he’s (mostly) right. Swerve has only ever cheated to beat Hangman. Swerve violated Hangman’s private life, going well beyond a pro wrestling rivalry. I get that some people would see Swerve’s cool factor as holding more weight than his evil deeds, but to boo Hangman? The dude’s family was in danger!

Then, Hangman attacks referee Paul Turner. It’s a pretty violent toss, and I openly question Hangman’s decision-making when he goes for the pin when the ref is still knocked out thanks to his own actions. Still, I’m more upset because Hangman’s being dumb, not because he’s being a bad dude.

A few moments later, when he’s hammering forearms into the back of back-up referee Bryce Remsburg’s head, I get noticeably quiet. I sit there watching my hero take a dark turn and become the guy everyone around me was treating him as.

I have the desire to cheer Swerve. I still stick to booing big boss Samoa Joe.

I don’t know how to feel about Hangman Page.

A Look at the Cool Bad Guy

One important thing that I want to hammer home here is that, no matter what, Swerve was squarely a villain until the end of this triple threat match. I told my family that, sure, Swerve hadn’t done anything heinous in a few months, he still hadn’t done anything heroic to make me change my opinion.

That didn’t mean I would never cheer Swerve. Prior to WrestleDream last year, when Swerve told Hangman that he aspired to become the first Black AEW World Champion, I was fully in support of Swerve’s cause. Perhaps it’s my own Blackness that moved me, or maybe it was just me acknowledging that Swerve really has the coolest wrestling style in AEW, but I cheered Swerve. And, at the same time, I appreciated that Hangman said he hoped that, even if the first black AEW Champion isn’t Swerve, he hopes for a future where black wrestlers aren’t still wondering if they will be.

At this point, Swerve had just gotten done doing a whole lot of villainous stuff — stuff so bad that Darby Allin and Sting felt it necessary to bury him in a coffin over it — but he was too cool to hate. And when someone’s that cool, it’s also hard not to respect them.

It’s kind of like how I feel about Jay White. Jay is super cool, and even if he’s been really sneaky, I have to respect the fact that he’s stood at the top of New Japan’s world title scene. I like all of his merch. He can talk me into any match. The dude is cool, and because he’s done some respectable stuff, I value him as a wrestler. However, pit Jay against any legitimate good guy, like an Orange Cassidy or Darby Allin, and I’m rooting against the Switchblade.

Similarly but quite different, there’s the Blackpool Combat Club, or specifically Jon Moxley. They’re always toeing the line of being true degenerates (except for Yuta, who is a full-on bastard), and Moxley’s love of weapons and hatred of perceived disrespect lead to lots of rule-bending and post-match assaults. None of the members of the BCC are cool in the way that Swerve and Jay are cool, but they are all respectable for the most part, as can be seen in the way that the three heavyweight members all gave Eddie Kingston the respect he earned after they lost to the Mad King.

With all of this in mind, during the Continental Classic, I rooted for Swerve over Jay White, a fellow cool villain. I also rooted for Swerve over Moxley, who has generally been less of a POS than Swerve. All the while, Swerve couldn’t cheat because the rules of the Classic were so stringent. Swerve dug in and did great, and I had to respect this dope dirtbag.

“Dirtbag?” I asked myself.

Swerve’s character became questionable, as it was hard to tell if he was on the straight and narrow because of limitations or because he’d changed as a person.

All I knew was that, once Hangman came back to Swerve after the Continental Classic to continue throwing hands, or at least shade, I was never going to root for Swerve over Hangman.

The Deeds of Swerve and Hangman

Take everything I just said about Swerve and throw it in the trash because Swerve was facing my freaking hero in Hangman Adam Page.

Hangman Page has been my guy since his G1 Climax run in New Japan back in 2018, and after his battle with Joey Janela at All In and while watching the Road to All Out shows leading up to his match against Christ Jericho at All Out 2019, I already became a certified Hangman Guy.

When Hangman lost to Jericho and started pushing the Young Bucks away, I didn’t want to pick sides at first because I was a fan of the whole Elite. However, I was so into Hangman’s early struggles against PAC, his tag title run with Kenny Omega, and his eventual run with the Dark Order against his former friends in the Elite that Hangman slowly became my favorite wrestler, beating out Omega for the role the same night he beat Omega for the AEW Championship.

Was Hangman the perfect guy? No, not at all. He screwed the Young Bucks out of a chance to face FTR. He seriously considered joining the Brodie Lee-led Dark Order (though he did change his mind before they asked him). Even watching back the classic Hangman and Omega vs the Young Bucks match from AEW Revolution 2020, Hangman did look kind of horrible with the way he was attacking Matt’s back, even if Matt was being a jerk.

However, to focus on these darker moments is to ignore the shot of Hangman crowd surfing after his Tag Championship win, taking part in the aforementioned greatest tag team match of all time at Revolution 2020, teaming with the Dark Order at Brodie Lee’s memorial and again in the lead up to All Out 2021, during which the Dark Order came out to that amazing cowboy entrance. And, between those last two moments, Hangman was in the ring for the “He said yes!” moment on Dynamite, which is still the funniest thing I’ve ever seen from AEW.

It doesn’t matter if you think the heart or soul of AEW is more important, because to me, Hangman is both.

Meanwhile, from my perspective, Swerve has acted as the biggest threat to that heart and soul.

 

On his own, Swerve is the person who literally tortured Billy Gunn and broke his fingers, beat freshly 18-year-old Nick Wayne to a bloody pulp in Nick’s late father’s wrestling ring, stomped a cinder block onto Keith Lee while Rick Ross talked trash, hired Trench, and most importantly to this conversation, broke into Hangman’s house and talked trash to Hangman’s baby.

If you’re wondering if Swerve repented prior to the triple threat match in Greensboro, no way! Swerve bragged about a lot of that stuff, including the illegal trespassing, on the go-home show to this year’s Revolution.

To me, Hangman is objectively right about his feelings on Swerve. Swerve cheated to beat him the first time. Swerve didn’t cheat the second time because it was a no-disqualification match, but the record book might as well say that Swerve AND Brian Cage beat Hangman at Full Gear 2023. And, no matter what Swerve does from here, no one should blame Hangman for holding the baby trash talk against him for life. Swerve would admit that; the only thing they truly disagree on is the matter of which man is the better wrestler.

On that note, I did cheer Hangman for not giving Swerve five more minutes when they went to a draw in their third match, though I recognized that the way the match ended — with Swerve hitting his finisher on Hangman right before the bell rang — didn’t help Hangman’s case.

I cheered Hangman when he confronted Swerve the following week, but I balked at his claim that he, not Swerve, deserved a title match, despite Hangman definitely losing the previous match if AEW matches went to judges’ decision. I also noticed that, when Hangman tried to get RVD riled up to get revenge on Swerve, RVD acknowledged that he didn’t really get screwed by Swerve and just kind of lost when the two men fought.

The crutches speech on the last Dynamite before Revolution 2024 was a harder pill to swallow, but there’s room to give Hangman the benefit of doubt. Right before Hangman smacked Swerve with his crutch, Swerve did bring up breaking into Hangman’s house. It’s possible that Hangman was so amped up with anger that he hulked up through his pain and attacked the man who was bragging about threatening Hangman’s family. In that scenario, Hangman’s a hero!

But, under the assumption that Hangman laid out a trap for Swerve, it’s a lot harder to defend. And with how little limping I saw out of Hangman at Revolution, evidence suggests that Hangman was being a bit of a conniving jerk.

Flashing back to the arena as Hangman dumped Paul Turner out of the ring, brutalized Bryce Remsburg in the ring, and more-than-likely tapped out to Samoa Joe simply to spite Swerve, I couldn’t really cheer or boo or anything when the match ended. Joe was a force of nature during the bout, but he wasn’t very dastardly throughout. Swerve, meanwhile, was offered a chance to cheat and threw it away, finally doing a good deed to prove he was worth cheering.

Hangman, meanwhile, had gone off the deep-end, and as I said up top, his actions made the boos make sense, even if I wasn’t going to boo him myself.

I can see a world where Hangman comes out on Dynamite and gives the classic “you people” speech. Like Wardlow watching the crowd cheer MJF in 2023, Ruby Soho responding to undue crowd negativity in 2022, or even going back to Becky Lynch when she turned on Charlotte in 2017, Neville when he returned from hiatus at the end of 2016, Mustafa Ali when he debuted on 205 Live in 2016, or Ciampa when he turned on Gargano in 2017 (I have a very specific time period of WWE that I loved, sue me), I can see Hangman blaming the crowd reaction for pushing him over the edge. And, if he does that, I can take pride in knowing that I was loudly cheering his every action at Revolution up until he started taking out officials.

But while Becky Lynch and Mustafa Ali both quickly turned around and said, “My bad,” as it was clear the crowd loved them both, the rest of the list started performing more and more heinous acts until the crowd that was kind of on their side had no choice but to boo them forever.

The question is, how much lower does Hangman sink before he gets his Cowboy Shit together? How much lower does my Hangman sink before I finally lose faith in my favorite wrestler?