As you almost certainly know, Hook is the new FTW Champion. He won the belt off of his fellow former member of Team Taz, Ricky Starks, at AEW's Fight for the Fallen after the former got a bit too cocky after an in-ring win over Danhausen, took photos with the belt and his father to make it officially, and will now attempt to keep his 11-straight match win streak alive with the strap around his waist.
Considering Taz originally christened the belt back in ECW, it's only been held by five people in total – including Sabu – and that the last two champions held the belts for over 300 days, anything short of a long and healthy title run by AEW's resident “handsome devil” would be a major bummer.
And yet, any championship run is only as good as the strength of the proverbial schedule. While a 1,000-day run is undoubtedly impressive, if it is only eight matches over a five-year period and they aren't exactly of the “marquee category,” few will consider the run worthy of a spot in the annals of wrestling history.
Will Hook's FTW run fall into that category, overtaking the runs of his father, Sabu, Brian Cage, and Ricky Starks for the best run in the belt's history? Or will fans wonder how Tony Khan and company messed up such a “can't miss” angle by failing to book Hook into the “Goldey Locks” territory?
Well, only time will unravel that mystery, but what isn't one, at least not anymore, is who will be Hook's first challenger for the belt, as none other than “The Reality” Zach Clayton came out on Rampage to stake his claim for the orange strap.
But who, you may ask, is Zach Clayton? Well, you might have seen him on AEW Dark… or as a cast member of MTV's The Jersey Shore.
Zach Clayton brings an interesting angle to AEW.
Zach Clayton has been wrestling since 2014. According to Cagematch, he made his in-ring debut on October 25th, 2014, at SAW wrestling in Vermont, where he lost to The Rickety Rocket.
Since then, he's wrestled 58 more matches, most of which took place in the greater New England/New York area for promotions like Dynasty, TIW, and IYFW, before officially making his debut for AEW in May of 2020, when he lost a match to QT Marshall in Jacksonville. AEW, as it turns out, would become a bit of a home base for Clayton from that point on, wrestling 12 straight matches over the next 20 months both on Dark during AEW's pandemic residency at Daily's Place and again when the show hit the road for Dark Elevation shows everywhere from Newark to Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and even Elmont New York.
Hmm… that's a lot of New Jersey on his Dark Elevation resume. Is he, like, from there or something?
Well, he isn't originally, but you could sort of say that, yeah.
You see, outside of the ring, Clayton has been dating JWOW of Jersey Shore fame since 2019, with the couple getting engaged in 2021. They've appeared at AEW shows in the past together, most notably at Double or Nothing and at the Jersey show Clayton wrestled for the promotion, and the MTV-TBS crossover has seemed to be pretty darn successful, as AEW has quite clearly backed up by giving a mic to the part-time vet, in a move that will surely drive anti-Mance Warner types like Miro crazy.
So what gives? Will Clayton, who most recently lost a Dark Elevation match to The Trust Busters alongside Xavier Walker and the now-villainous Sonny Kiss, actually give Hook the business and enter into an extended feud? Or will this prove to be a bit too much pop and circumstance for a match that will ultimately result in the same outcome as seemingly every other Hook match, aka a clean win? Only time will tell, but based on his conversation with Darren Paltrowitz of Paltrocast, it sounds like landing a full-time opportunity with AEW is very much his goal moving forward, as you can read below via a transcription from 411 Mania.
“Since AEW. I’ve always been busy with a job, so it was just the weekend shows. I wasn’t making enough money to live off the weekend shows. Since AEW has become more frequent, which I still want it to become more frequent because that’s the wrestler in me, you just want to work. That’s coming. I’m looking forward to it. I get paid by appearance, I don’t have an official contract deal. I wrestle when I can, which is frequent, much more frequent now, but looking for that full full-time would be great.”
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