Tomasso Ciampa Wasn’t Sure He Would End Up In AEW, Recalls Getting Emotional Over It

Tommaso Ciampa says that he wasn’t sure when he was preparing to leave WWE that he would end up in AEW, as he noted in a new interview. Ciampa made his debut for AEW on the January 28th episode of Dynamite, just two days after he was moved to the alumni section of WWE.com. He captured the TNT Championship in his first match, though he has since lost the title to Kyle Fletcher.

Ciampa appeared on AEW’s Close-Up With Renee Paquette and spoke about his move to AEW. He noted that it was something that the prospect of coming to AEW made him “super emotional.” You can see the highlights below:

On Not Knowing He Would End Up In AEW:

“Yeah, I mean it certainly feels that way now. It’s one of them fun things too, where the unknown is terrifying. So I had no clue what the next step was to do that too, and I didn’t even know if I was going to land here. I wanted to, but I didn’t know.”

On Getting Emotional Over His Arrival In AEW:

“So there was a lot of emotions for six to eight weeks leading up to it. And it’s funny, like I’m an emotional guy. I’m super emotional. We always say with [his daughter] Willow, it’s like, ‘You can have big emotions, cry it out, whatever it is, you have it.’ And for me, it’s like if I have big, big matches or just, something I’m really looking forward to, I start to get it when I train. I’ll be doing my cardio and I start to just well [up]. And then I train, and I’m fine, but it’s it’s always that cardio. And I hadn’t had that in a bit. And as I was just approaching just the hope of maybe this is going to happen, like I would start to really feel it. And then once we actually discussed the entrance, and me and Mike Mansury started to piece together the silhouette, I remember being in the gym at my house and just kind of envisioning it, and literally like welling. And I was like, ‘Holy, — okay, wow.’ Which to me is a trigger that like we’re on to something.”: