Gabe Kidd, who shared the Death Riders locker room with PAC in recent months, said the two talked about teaming up in AEW shortly before PAC’s death.
Kidd recently told Chris Jericho in an interview that he has known PAC since 2011. Back then, he was still helping set up the ring for a Dragon Gate UK show in Nottingham. But it wasn’t until they were on the road with the Death Riders that they got close.
During a dinner in Charleston, West Virginia, the two realized how similar their careers were, as both of them left England at a very young age to wrestle in Japan.
“But we were saying that we went there as boys,” Kidd said. “We lived at home, never lived outside of the home. And when we went there, it was like the first time we had to do our own laundry and stuff like that.”
That’s where the idea for a tag team came from. The team would have played up the fact that they were both English on AEW TV.
“And just, we were talking about the idea of a tag team and being like two rough English boys, you know, on American TV,” Kidd said.
Kidd also admitted that he still hasn’t come to terms with the loss. A big reason is that PAC used to take time off from AEW to go back home to England.
“And then you realize why, and it’s almost you don’t want to accept it,” he said. “It’s still so fresh. And there would be periods of time where he would go back to England and he just wouldn’t be at the show. So it almost still feels like that now.”
PAC passed away on September 27 at 40, the day after wrestling Andrade El Idolo in an AEW National Championship match at All Out in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. In October, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that he died of bronchial asthma and ruled his death natural.
PAC, who wrestled as Neville in WWE from 2012 to 2018, signed with AEW in 2019. In AEW, he became the first-ever AEW All-Atlantic Champion and was a two-time AEW World Trios Champion with Death Triangle and the Death Riders.