Stokely Hathaway Explains How The Concept Of The Firm 'Kept Changing' In AEW

Stokely Hathaway has had a strange first year in AEW. After initially being brought in as the new manager of Jade Cargill and The Baddies, he was moved over to managing The Firm in an alliance with MJF in a planned feud with CM Punk, only for Punk to be injured/suspended while the MJF alliance only lasted a couple of months and clearly, everything was deviating from the original plan. On Friday, Chris Jericho released a new episode of his "Talk is Jericho" podcast with Stokely as the guest, and the constantly-shifting plan was one of the first topics they discussed.

"I guess I didn't view it that way because I'm trying to get in the habit of looking at things from a positive perspective," he explained when asked if he saw The Firm as being "out in the cold" as a result of Punk's sabbatical. "Regardless of who was in that position, the idea was to go after the world champion, so we still had that opportunity. It obviously didn't turn out the way that most of us wanted it to, but it was still an avenue to get things going." Hathaway added that his main contribution was the name of the stable, which he took from the hip-hop supergroup of the same name, though he also pushed the group further towards comedy after the MJF storyline was over.

Stokely added that the initial promo introducing The Firm was too long and too dense with information, to the point that he didn't think it came across that, as a group, they were primarily MJF's "hired guns." He actually went shorter than his allotted time, though, going about four and a half minutes instead of six. "Looking back at it, I probably should have just kept it to the essentials of three bullet points, but hindsight is 20/20," he concluded.