It finally sank in for Kyle Fletcher how far he has come when he signed a new contract with AEW earlier this year.
Former TNT Champion Fletcher reportedly inked a “long-term” deal with AEW back in August. Per Fightful Select, it was a “big money deal” to keep the 26-year-old where he has mainly worked since 2023.
Fletcher confirmed the news of a recent contract signing during a recent interview with Chris Van Vilet, commenting on what the new agreement meant to him.
“Man, it felt really cool,” he said. “I was on a beach in Jamaica when I signed my contract. It was pretty surreal, man. It was one of those moments that I thought about my whole life, signing that first big deal. It gave me a bit of, I hate throwing around words, but impostor syndrome. It made me feel like I was like, man, when I was growing up, I thought maybe there were one or two people with these kind of contracts in the whole world of wrestling, and here I am. It’s very weird to realize, man, this spot that I’m in, it’s pretty big. It’s pretty special.”
It wasn’t always for sure that Fletcher would be an AEW talent. The Australian talent described to Van Vilet how he was briefly in talks years back to potentially join WWE alongside then-tag partner Mark Davis.
“We had a Zoom call with them, we kind of spoke about what the deal would entail, that sort of thing,” Fletcher said about their conversations with WWE. “I think when it got to that point, it just didn’t feel like the right fit at the time. We didn’t get super close, it was kind of at the point where there was options there. But, AEW was just the right fit for us at the time, for sure.”
Why did Fletcher eventually choose AEW? The “vibe,” as he describes it:
“We were lucky enough that we had worked there a couple of times; we were brought in as part of New Japan to do a couple of things. I think it was the vibe there. To me it was, I don’t want to say the freedom, but I think there’s a lot of trust there that I can produce the wrestling I want to produce, and I can wrestle the way that I like to wrestle. And experiencing that beforehand and knowing that, I think that was what kind of drew me towards AEW for sure.”
Fletcher is currently competing as part of AEW’s third-ever Continental Classic tournament, having attained two wins through three appearances thus far. He’s expected to wrestle his fourth tournament match on Wednesday’s episode of Dynamite, facing Death Riders member PAC.
