Ford and Sabian kept their signings under wraps.
When All Elite Wrestling launched in 2019, both Kip Sabian and Penelope Ford had been contacted prior to the formal announcement and were signed to deals.
Sabian and Ford, now married, were dating at the time and did not know the other was signed. Sabian shared that information on Sean Smith’s Sappenin’ Podcast. He stated that both him and Penelope kept their signings under wraps and he found out she was signed at the first press conference in Jacksonville, Florida.
There’s a lot of people that thought because her (Penelope Ford) and Joey (Janela) were doing the gimmick together, they were actually a couple but they’d been broken up for a long time in between which is why I got a lot of heat when we started dating because they’re like, ‘Oh, he stole Joey’s girl.’ Don’t be that type of mark. It’s a gimmick, you know what I mean? But yeah, we started talking and then it was the initial AEW announcement in January when I already knew I was signing, but I couldn’t say anything. When she walked out and I was like, ‘No!’ Because we had not told each other. So we both kept it under. We were talking everyday and we both kept it under wraps and then literally, I text her saying, ‘I guess we’re gonna be colleagues as well now’ so I was like wow, this works out great. So then, that was when we were like, ‘Okay, we probably can pursue this further now because we’re gonna be working together.’
Sabian began to discuss his on-screen start in AEW and feels he made a mistake by not taking what he was doing on the indies and bringing it to AEW.
He stated that he was under the assumption that his character and persona would be developed through the vision of the powers that be.
Which leads into what has happened during my AEW career which, you know, I’ve been very unlucky which now I see as being luck so, I didn’t realize when going in how I probably should have stuck to what I was doing on the indies initially which was the ‘Superbad’, heel, do my own entrance intro, that kind of stuff, and I kind of decided, hey, I’m signed by this company. In my brain, I thought of the old WWE mentality of you get signed, you build yourself, your gimmick and stuff is almost developed within the company. Whereas at AEW, it’s very different in the fact that it’s not like that. It’s you go in and you have a lot of creative control yourself and then Tony (Khan) will fine-tune everything or there’s a bunch of times where Tony will have the ideas like The Acclaimed or things like that where Tony has that idea, he sees it and they develop that from Tony’s vision. But for me, I went in and was like, okay, I’m a pretty good wrestler. I’m just gonna be a babyface and I’m just gonna wrestle and I’m gonna have fun and I’m just gonna wrestle and it was the biggest mistake I made. Because as much as I’d wrestled as a babyface in the past, I feel like I’m not an Ospreay or a Dante Martin when it comes to athletic craziness. So I feel like as a babyface, there’s a peak at some point for a cruiserweight babyface. Whereas a heel, I’ve got that personality and I can do me better than anyone can do me. So I made that mistake initially when I first came in. Then thankfully, we managed to transition into that with Penelope (Ford) and I had the manager stuff going on which, you know, I really enjoyed at the time but now I look back and I see what I’m doing now and I’m like, man, I’ve developed a lot more mentally.
Earlier this year, Ford and Sabian competed for DDT Pro-Wrestling in Japan and they held the Iron Man Heavymetalweight Championship.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit the Sappenin’ Podcast with Sean Smith with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
