Select Answers: Hade Vansen, WWE to AEW, Claudio (Patreon)

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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With Claudio being booked to look really strong the last few weeks in AEW (as well as one of the coolest spots have seen in a long time on Wednesday with the trash can) can you see him maybe being positioned for a title run in 2027?

I don't expect that to happen at this point. At any given time, a wrestler can get really hot, and a snap decision can be made to put a title on them. However, I haven't ever heard anything that pointed to him having a world title run. Not that I don't think he's capable. I just haven't heard of anything like that.

What wrestler from WWE do you would benefit from leaving the company like Drew Mcintyre , Cody Rhodes .

Well, benefiting is at the discretion of each individual performer. I'm pretty sure AEW would have paid Cody Rhodes about anything he wanted to come back to the company. There are few needle movers left that could categorically shift a company, and he's one of them. He still will be when his WWE deal is up too. But he seems very happy doing what he's doing and I know WWE wanted to make sure he was there permanently. I don't think Drew would benefit from leaving. He was world champion this year, got a bunch of movie roles, is very over and is making good money. Probably Jordynne Grace is the person who could benefit the most. Being booked at all would be an improvement, she'd make a comparable salary, and could do her outside content that she was making a killing off of.

What’s the story of what happened with Hade Vansen? Did he ever wrestle again after WWE?

It was very weird. They had this big plan of him to be their version of "Fallen Angel" Christopher Daniels, but leading basically a group of "mutants" against Undertaker. In the years prior, they weren't able to land Sting. They tried to get Abyss multiple times. I'm not sure if they actually ever tried for Daniels, but this Hade Vansen was similarly sized, similar look, but couldn't wrestle anywhere near as good as Daniels. They ran promos for him in December 2008, and released him by January 9. Freddie Prinze was a big part of the idea, then it was just put on hold. They fired him shortly after that. I believe he still lives in LA, and has done acting and photography since.