“It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
It’s the Spring of 2022. I’m grabbing lunch with a friend at Cyclone Anaya’s, a Tex-Mex restaurant named after Texas Wrestling standout Jesus Becerra Valencia. We’re discussing the ins and outs of our respective careers: I’m complaining about the end of the semester as we transition into our college summer session, he’s giving out real time scouting reports on some of the talent his employer, All Elite Wrestling, has recently signed. The name Swerve Strickland comes up, and I immediately jump in to say my piece.
“The wrestling is so good,” I tell him. “The character stuff? That’ll sort itself out. As long as the wrestling is that good, he can figure out exactly how he wants to present himself.”
Over the next few years, you’d see Strickland try out different ways to convey his artistic side: he’d come out flanked by artists like Rick Ross and Jim Jones. He’d have high art pieces in the background of his vignettes. He’d shuffle different wrestlers in and out as heavies/partners. But what really solidified Swerve Strickland as a focused, fully realized main event player was a literal nail in the coffin.
“[People] want to understand why” Strickland reflects, looking back over the last year of his career. “They want to understand why this person's in pain. They want to understand… what's causing the motive, what's their gripe, whether they're good or bad, who's hurting them? Why are they hurting?”
His hurt, specifically, started at All In 2023, AEW’s largest attended show to date. He’d team with Christian Cage against Sting and Darby Allin in a Coffin Match, and would be the one to take the loss for his team. As he was incapacitated, he was placed into the coffin with the lid slammed shut on him. While he wouldn’t abandon the “Mogul” persona he’d been building up, Strickland would emerge from that coffin more focused, hell bent on making sure faction additions and expensive accessories wouldn’t get in the way of in-ring success. In some ways, it mirrored the ascent of his now-retired opponent Sting: he’d draw dark circles around his eyes, and grow his hair long to represent the death of the old ways he’d done things. But while Sting had wars with Mastodons, Giants and Hitmen, Swerve surveyed the AEW landscape and saw a Cowboy he’d battle all the way to the top of the wrestling mountain.
“His heart is a suspended lute; As soon as you touch it, it resonates.”
The great thing about reverence is that it doesn’t have to come from a place of preservation. Sometimes breaking something, or someone, is the best way to explain their true value. I don’t have much use for wrestling Mount Rushmores, but the company name of All Elite Wrestling is a direct reference to tag team royalty The Young Bucks, all-world all-everything Kenny Omega, and, according to Strickland himself, the focal point of it all, Hangman Adam Page.
“He’s the main character of All Elite Wrestling.” Swerve states with no hyperbole attached to his claim. While Strickland had been climbing and climbing to this point, Page existed in a weird space: he’d most recently been feuding with CM Punk, whose final match with the company – and everything surrounding it – had Page and others in creative Limbo.
After spending so much time fine tuning what he’d presented, the next step for Swerve was finding the right dance partner to show that the changes weren’t just cosmetic. “He was in a different mind state,” Swerve remembers. “It was finding that passion once again, [Page] was down, down, really low and bringing them up to the surface level… and then it was also reminding them, ‘Hey, you know the hell you are… you're Hangman Page’ let me bring out something new and who he is at the same time.”
That “new” was a level of violence neither man had experienced during their AEW tenure, with the highlight being their Texas Deathmatch at Full Gear 2024. But it was deeper than what happened between the bell. It was pen stabbings, it was home invasions, it was Swerve’s claims that with the same opportunities, he’d be further along than Page at this point in his career. It all goes to a mindset Swerve employs to separate himself from the pack: you can make things look cool, but how do you make the people feel what you’re trying to get across? How do you create the idea that what I’m watching might be deeper than what they're used to?
“[A lot of what you see comes from] my love of horror movies… those fear aspects of it,” Swerve reveals. “It's a kind of fear of ‘oh, this could really happen. Oh, wow, this is sick. This is happening right in front of my eyes. This isn’t a parlor trick. This is a really a man doing this to another man.’ That's where the emotional drive comes from. And that's what makes it unique… because [Page is] just as sick as I am now because I got him there.”
The feud still resonates with Swerve, even when he sees new, comparable talents on the rise. Standing out from the most amazing athletes can be difficult, so finding the right notes to hit with the right people can satisfy that need to be unique. “[Adam Page and I] don't just trade movement and moves and styles, we trade philosophies,” Swerve says with reverence for his greatest foe. “I feel like that's where my thinking in-ring really is starting to change. It's elevating in a sense, but it's also just changing and becoming my own. It's becoming me and that's probably one of the hardest things to do. Like [NXT wrestler] Je'Von Evans, Top Flight, Hologram, how do I find me in all of this? How do I create me? How do you make kids want to dress up like you at Halloween?”
“His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten.”
Like all fraternities, professional wrestling has its own chapters across its various campuses. At AEW’s inaugural Dynasty pay-per-view, Strickland would join that small club of Black Male World Champions in professional wrestling, with the added distinction of being the very first in the promotion. After an unsuccessful attempt in a Triple Threat match alongside Adam Page earlier in the year, he’d defeat Samoa Joe one on one, seeing all his hard work payoff in a history-making moment. It was a celebration in real time; He was flanked by Prince Nana, the injection of light hearted fun to his very serious demeanor. He was adorned in Black Panther-inspired gear, a tribute to his good friend/training partner Gui DaSilva-Greene, who was Chadwick Boseman’s stuntman across multiple MCU projects. And once he’d made history, the who’s who of Black wrestling history makers made sure he felt the importance of the moment.
“Those guys gave me love every week and they don’t have to” Swerve says, referring to The New Day, the pioneering tag team collective that worked their way to WWE Title status. “But I’ve always made sure to speak out and say ‘you guys influenced me.' Kofi Kingston [in particular]. In my own way hopefully I did it justice. Hopefully I did him proud.”
He’d also earn adoration from the men who’d been doing this at the highest level before he’d even attended his first training session. “I got calls from Mark Henry. MVP gave me a nice warm embrace there,” he recalls. “It's just cool to be in that circle. I can talk to these guys about this because I kind of earned it in that way. Because you always want to be in that conversation in a sense. ‘Do I belong in that conversation? No,I really am in that conversation now. So I can talk with them in a different way. We've done it in our own respective eras and times.”
For Swerve, it's not enough to just be Champion. Winning a World Title stamps you, but how you carry on from there is what changes the conversation around you. “I want to be that guy,” Swerve proclaims. “We see all these rankings [but how many feature] Black men or women? I would say [WWE superstar] Bianca [Belair] has that title. She's killing it. [ROH Women's World Champion] Athena has that title. They're killing it. But it's very rare. It's like the bar is on a different planet and we can't get to it. Hopefully as time goes on we look back on it and hopefully I have closed the gap as one of the highest ranked Black performers.”
“You have your philosophy and I have mine.”
In a few short years, Swerve solidified his presentation, found his chief rival and made history. But it’s the entirety of the journey that made the jump from 2022 to right now seem like overnight success. By Strickand’s own admission wrestling only has so many moves. So if you can’t reinvent the wheel, how do you make your trip, and your rotation different from everyone else’s?
“Wrestlers [want to become] synonymous with an adjective or an action in a positive way, that’s where my influences come from,” Swerve says. “Like watching films, how arguments start, how it's concluded. When you're watching a [movie fight] how do you know who's evil, how you know who's intention, what's intent and just all these different things. That's where I'm really geared towards now.”
That mindset of intention and providing a satisfying conclusion will be put to the test as he travels to Wembley Stadium to defend his AEW World Championship against Bryan Danielson at this year’s All In.
Where Adam Page was about showing progress and passion, and winning the World Title was breaking down barriers, Strickland now faces the task of trying to put one of the very best ever out to pasture on the largest stage he’ll have headlined in his career. Danielson says if he doesn’t win the title, he’ll retire from the profession, adding a sense of urgency to a man that’s never needed additional motivation. Swerve’s stance isn’t one of nervousness or apprehension; he feels he’s getting his just due just being in this spot.
“I look to this probably more than he does,” Swerve explains. “And that's really tough to say because, I mean, nobody is excited about wrestling more than Bryan Danielson. That makes me one of the best in this generation, in my opinion, because I'm going up against the best and that man deems me worthy of putting his career on the line. And that's perspective that you can't buy.”
And perspective is maybe Swerve’s biggest gain over the last few years. It’s not just facing the top talent in the world, week in and week out. It’s not looking up and seeing his name on the marquee with some of the best to ever do it. It’s all that’s happening in between, it’s the kids at the meet and greets, sharing studio time with Griselda and getting Bun B on his entrance theme’s remix, it’s the family and friends who show up to celebrate his accomplishments when the cameras go off, it’s existing in a world he can now mold in his image.
“I always question [if I get proper credit]. But when I go to do these signings, I meet with fans telling me how they felt watching Lucha Underground, they're telling me about how they felt when me and Keith Lee won the tag titles. As a performer? I perform for the people so it means the world that people know my name and in a positive light. You know what I mean? I want to keep doing that.”