Authors of Pain Say They Never Changed As Tag Team Champions: We Were Always The Nicest Guys

They don’t come much nicer than Authors of Pain…if you listen to the former Rezar and Akam, that is.

Former WWE Tag Team Champions Akam and Rezar of Authors of Pain recently appeared on The Sessions with Renée Paquette. Rezar would recall being ‘hazed’ by Baron Corbin whilst on a European tour following capturing the RAW Tag Team Titles.

“We became Champions and we saw guys just turn 360 on us, like completely 360,” Rezar remembered. “We actually got on a European tour after [winning the Tag Team Championship] and then on the European tour, obviously, we had so much fun with some of the guys in the back. Roman, Jon, obviously we had a lot of fun in the back but we had a lot of people start heat out of nowhere. For example, there is this story oh, I’ve never told many people, actually Jon back me up on this one. we were still the new guys and we had to, supposedly, we didn’t know, we had to lift up the beers the big create of beers from the bus to the hotel. We didn’t know that. So we walk into the hotel, I’m waiting in line for catering because I was hungry after the match, and they didn’t care obviously, because we were Champions, but they didn’t pay any mind to that. Corbin went up to me and he says, ‘Hey, young boy, you gotta pick up that crate of beers.’ I turn, I look around, and said ‘Excuse me?’ He said, ‘I did the same thing when I was a young boy. You gotta pick up the beer, man. I’m thirsty,’ or something like that. I said, ‘Are you seriously talking to me like this? You can’t ask nicely?’ If you said, hey, bro do you want to please grab those beers? Everybody who is new does this. It’s the right way to go.’ But, you call me a young boy in front of everybody here oh, man. Are you serious? So I said, ‘Corbin, come here, man.’ Like, in front of the whole crowd. Everybody went quiet. I said, ‘are you seriously talking to me like that?’ He goes, I apologize. I didn’t mean to say it like that. I did it. Everybody does it.’”

Regardless of their on-screen personas, Rezar said he and Akam never let their successes get to their heads backstage.

“A lot of things happened like that once we became champions and we were just cool,” Rezar admitted. “We were just cool but people thought we were going to start turning into dickheads, we didn’t. We were the nicest guys still as champions. We don’t care if we are champions or not. Obviously, everybody knows it’s scripted. We saw a lot of people turning differently once that happened. I guess that’s just the way it goes everywhere, right? Not just in wrestling, it goes everywhere like that, once you get success.”

Authors of Pain captured both the RAW and NXT Tag Team Titles during their run in the company before being released in March 2020.