Jack Evans On What He Blames For His AEW Release
Former AEW and AAA star Jack Evans joined Insight with Chris Van Vliet to talk about his departure from AEW at the end of April. Much like he expressed on Twitter after announcing his contract wouldn't be renewed, Evans said he had no ill will towards the promotion.
"It's one of those things where I don't actually have any bad experiences or anything," Evans said. "Like I said in the follow-up tweet, I don't want to diss myself, but I kind of understand where they're coming from. I don't feel that I was giving added value to the company. It's just one of those things.
"Being on the AEW salary contract on cheap and everything is awesome. But it wasn't a bitter breakup or anything, by any stretch of the imagination. And I understood where they were coming from. It wasn't something out of left field."
Jack Evans was also complimentary about AEW allowing his contract to run its course, as opposed to releasing him several months or years before its expiration date.
"One thing that I want to put AEW over for is waiting your whole contract and not just 'okay, we decided we don't want this guy no more. Dump him next week or whatever,'" Evans said. "I actually started this huge Twitter fight. I didn't want to get involved, because those Twitter fights are just eternal. But it started this huge fight and I'm like 'I really feel like that's the way to handle it.' I really like that they honor the length that they told you they were going to give you, you know what I mean?"
As for what he feels led to his release, Jack Evans felt two layoffs following his first year in AEW led to him losing his form, something he believes he never quite recovered until it was too late.
"I feel like, for that first year, the run started good and we kind of had a little place of like a semi-comedic tag team," Evans said. "Not like straight comedy or whatever, but we were doing stuff with Kevin Smith, and we just had a place. And then there was the Mexican border. So me and Angelico were both stuck. South of Mexico got closed for the COVID restrictions. And we had this four-month layoff.
"Then I came back, had one match, and then in practice before a match, I actually got my face broken again, and then I had another month and a half or two-month layoff. And I feel after that, I never came back to full form. I feel like I deteriorated. I can't even blame it on ring rust, I don't know what happened. We never had the same momentum. But it wasn't one of those things where like I felt like I was wrestling good and the momentum just didn't get started. I felt like I had deteriorated in the ring.
"And it sounds weird, but it started to give me these self-confidence problems because anyone that's known me this long knows I'm so nervous for my match. I dry heave, I'm the most annoying guy in the locker room you've ever seen. But then once I step through those curtains, I'm 100% confident, even cocky. But it was like this thing. I'd go through the curtain and I'd still be nervous as hell.
"So yeah. After that COVID layoff and the layoff from the face break, I just feel on a personal level I just never came back to being able to wrestle like me, both character-wise, in-ring skillwise. Anything like that. And I also think that salary contract I feel like made me a bit soft. There was even a little while I got a bit plump.
"I just kind of fell off after that layoff, and I feel like I only really started getting back on the ball towards the end. And by then, I think the company had kind of already made up its mind on me or whatever. I did just kind of get, not lazy in the ring necessarily, but I wasn't good in the ring and I was very lazy outside of the ring. It all started with that original COVID layoff and the face break layoff."
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Insight with Chris Van Vliet and provide an h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription