Orange Cassidy wasn’t a fan of AEW merging the International and Continental Championships, and for once, the guy who supposedly doesn’t care actually cared quite a bit. Cassidy felt he had put too much work into giving the International Title its own identity just to watch it get combined with another championship.
Speaking with Adrian Hernandez, Cassidy looked back at the title run that helped change how a lot of fans viewed him. Before Cassidy ever held it, though, the championship was known as the All-Atlantic Title and belonged to PAC.
“The International Title started as the All-Atlantic Championship, right? And PAC won that in a four-way. And we all know PAC is one of the best to ever wrestle.”
PAC ended up becoming much more than simply the guy Cassidy beat for the championship. Cassidy believes their history together has been important enough that PAC could ultimately be remembered as the defining rival of his career.
“I feel like he will go down as my career rival. I was able to capture that All-Atlantic Championship from PAC.”
Once Cassidy had the title, he wanted to make it feel like something instead of simply another belt in a company that already had plenty of them. His approach was basically to be himself and let the championship develop an identity around what he was doing with it.
“And when you get a championship, a new championship, right? Like—and AEW has a lot of them, we know that—an identity is—is when you—when I have this thing, I get, like—I was me with it. Like, I did what I thought was right, and it gave it an identity.”
That’s why AEW eventually combining the International and Continental Championships bothered him. Cassidy admitted that despite his entire personality being built around not caring very much, this was one decision he genuinely didn’t like.
“I—who don’t care about a lot of things—cared when it was merged with the Continental and they had, like, that one championship that was the International and the Continental.”
For Cassidy, the problem was what that merger represented. He felt a lot of work had gone into making the International Championship something wrestlers could chase outside of the AEW World Championship, and suddenly that identity was being folded into something else.
“I didn’t like that because I felt that a lot of hard work went into that championship to actually make it something of the—the other than a World Championship, you know, a championship that people could go after.”
Cassidy also remembers exactly how people viewed him when that run started. He went from hearing that he was a “joke” or “mascot” to carrying the International Championship into a pay-per-view main event against Jon Moxley.
“And to look at that lineage of where it started, for me, who everybody was like, ‘Oh, joke, mascot, dumb,’ like, insulting—like, to make this a championship to actually headline a pay-per-view with Jon Moxley.”
That’s ultimately why the merger bothered Cassidy so much. He had spent his reign trying to turn the International Championship into something worth chasing on its own, and after getting it all the way to a pay-per-view main event, he felt AEW combining it with another title made a lot of that work feel like it had been for nothing.
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