The Art of Ending a Title Reign

When Tony Khan gets it right, things just work.

Hangman Adam Page’s ascent to his first AEW title was simple but effective: the anxious millennial cowboy came back from parental leave, won a Casino Ladder Match and proceeded to challenge his former tag team partner and rival Kenny Omega at the next pay-per-view. Omega, meanwhile, used interference from Don Callis and his relationships with the Elite to hold on to the championship for months. The match itself was built on deep history between the resented champion and beloved challenger that played in to the overbooking, but it wasn’t complicated. The pop when Hangman put Omega down was an audience responding to the right decision at the right time for the story.

Fast-forward to this year. Hangman has been on a hell of a ride to deepen and complicate his character and brings a groundswell of fan support for his second reign – but when the crowd goes wild as he chokes out Jon Moxley, it’s equal parts joy and relief. The drawn-out, repetitive Death Riders angle that squandered its original promise and had the same basic storyline the Young Bucks were running had been trying the audience’s patience for most of the year. In the end, the Texas Death Match felt like a mercy killing.

Having the perma-crocked Omega as champion might occasionally force the issue, but there is an art to ending a title reign. It’s a harder way to approach booking than to focus on the challenger. Every armchair booker has thought of a hundred ways their favourite could win the title, but if you ask them how the champ loses, they either haven’t decided or don’t really care. The excitement is in the chase, the catharsis in the win.

But winning a title and keeping it are very different prospects, both for the characters we root for and the people who write them. There is joy in a well-booked title run which finds new ways to develop the champion and elevate everyone around them – and which, crucially, does not outstay its welcome.

So here is AEW’s ultimate quandary: how long before the Timeless One feels past her sell-by date?

Toni Storm is the ace of the women’s division. The Timeless persona emerged after the end of her second title run and has kept her at the top of the mountain: Mariah May only got a run in the middle so that Toni could win it back to blow off the feud. She regularly gets the biggest reactions on Dynamite and Collision and continues to have well-worked matches which get fans invested. Yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that her defining story ended when she reclaimed that title. The gimmick is over and the jokes still draw laughs, but they’re basically the same jokes every week. Eventually, the crowd will start to feel the weight of repetition.

There’s a logic to making hay while the sun shines, but Timeless Toni Storm is over with or without the belt. The title, meanwhile, could elevate stars and spark new stories if it changed hands: the rub from beating Toni and sending her off into non-title feuds makes the next champion seem unbeatable, until they’re not.

That’s how wrestling works. You get over, you build momentum, you win, you rule, then you put someone else over and they rule in a different way so the company always has something new to offer an audience. The problem is that this model needs both a challenger who feels like a viable champion and a champion who feels worth beating. Timing can be difficult to have both at once, but currently, AEW’s women’s division can’t manage it at all.

Fans were split on who should win the match between Toni and Mercedes Moné at All In Texas. It was the biggest match AEW could run for the exact same reason that it was the hardest to book – a loss for either would feel huge.  Champion vs champion (though Mercedes’ TBS title was not on the line), ace vs undefeated: there were arguments for either to win, but they ultimately all came down to “Well if she isn’t the one to beat her, then who is?”

Mercedes has main evented WrestleMania. Her star power is almost unsurpassed. She had little to gain from beating Toni, but defeating Moné is one of very few achievements that could actually still elevate Storm. It probably was the right decision to have Toni win, but it left her with absolutely nowhere else to go. Time to use that prestige and credibility to put someone over.

And that brings us to Athena. The Forever Champ of Ring of Honor (ROH) has carried that promotion on her back for years. She was in the first women’s match to main event a ROH pay-per-view and has made the women’s division a staple of the TV show, seemingly by being just too good to ignore. She is not undefeated but she is coming up on nearly three years with the title. She became the longest-serving champion in ROH history nearly a year ago. She would be a credible champion but still has something to gain by beating Storm. Athena, the perfect candidate to end Toni’s reign, has been under our noses the whole time.

She lost at Forbidden Door.

Not only did Athena lose, but she tapped out in a match that never really looked like it could go her way. That causes more headaches in the wider Tony Khan Wrestling Universe precisely because Khan doesn’t know how to end her title reign either.

She has lost to both of AEW’s current women’s champions while serving as the most dominant champion in ROH history, which weakens not only her but the entire secondary promotion. There’s clearly an end coming when she loses the title to Billie Starkz, but that does not have a timeline and creates another impossible situation. Had she dropped the title before chasing Storm, it would have lessened Athena’s stock as challenger; if she had beaten Storm while still ROH Women’s Champion, how would she have dropped that belt without cheapening the other?

It’s possible Khan has kept the belt on Athena because he doesn’t know what else to do with her. If it isn’t a millstone around her neck, it’s clearly becoming a creative problem for him. Had Khan given Athena the AEW title as well he would have had to write himself out of a different corner, but Toni has beaten every credible challenger. Athena was the last viable exit strategy. He’ll have to heat up Jamie Hayter pretty damn fast and work some real magic to end this Timeless reign.