Hangman Page: Being The Elite Was Never Supposed To Be Something Grand, Just Friends Dicking Around

Being The Elite has become a key part in wrestling history as the series helped propel Ring of Honor to new heights and was a launching point for All Elite Wrestling. 

The show started as a travel vlog for The Young Bucks, but morphed into a storytelling vehicle with angles and bits playing out on ROH and AEW television. The popular YouTube series helped enhance the career of Hangman Page, who got to show off his personality, which many didn’t always see in ROH and NJPW. 

“I don’t have any intentions of quitting wrestling anytime soon, but I think by the time I get there, looking back, the stuff that we did with BTE and everything that blossomed from it will probably be one of, if not the biggest point in my legacy,” Hangman said on AEW Unrestricted. “Not even that I was the guy doing it, we all had fun doing this stuff together. A lot of stuff came out of it, memorable feuds. When we were with Ring of Honor, attendance was going through the roof and the people there weren’t necessarily concerned about what we were doing in ROH, they would be chanting about me killing Joey Ryan. It was like, ‘Holy shit, we’re on to something. We’re filling these arenas. Ring of Honor is doing a great job, but it’s us, we’re doing this.’ It never felt to me like we were setting out to do something grand. It felt like a bunch of friends sitting around, joking, dicking around.”

Some Being The Elite stories were tied up at All In, which is billed as the largest Independent show in wrestling history, including Hangman’s feud with Joey Ryan. You can find Hangman’s comments on that feud and a memorable All In moment by clicking here.

Elsewhere during the podcast, Hangman revealed that he’s part of the editing process on BTE. 

“Typically, the stuff I do on BTE, I will shoot it and edit it. When we did Marty [Scurll] singing ‘Complicated’ by Avril Lavigne, he didn’t listen to the song when he sang it, so he was all out of tune. I wanted to put music to it, so I find to find the karaoke track and speed and up and slow it down depending on how Marty was singing,” he said.

BTE is a collaborative effort between the Young Bucks and Brandon Cutler, who does most of the filming for the series. Fightful spoke to Cutler about Being The Elite in November 2019, you can read his comments about the show by clicking here. 

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