Tommaso Ciampa is sick to his stomach that you think he peaked

Lots of sports motivation comes from that “no one believes in us” attitude they teach you early on, that proverbial chip on your shoulder. It’s not always rooted in reality, but the tough and talented find a way to push themselves, to help themselves succeed in ways they never thought possible. Tommaso Ciampa, one of the most creative and focused wrestlers on the planet, is taking that chip to a new level — where others have those metaphorical missions, he quite literally has an entire giraffe on his shoulder. 

“This is Google!” Ciampa explains on a Thursday morning, showing off his new friend. 

The 40-year-old longtime WWE star is at the Blue Hills Ranch & Hotel, a nature resort just outside of Waco, Texas. He’d been planning to take his family there for awhile, and it just so happened that it was an hour north of Cedar Park, the location of January's final "AEW Dynamite" taping. Ever the optimist, he hoped being in Texas the same week as an AEW show might just pave the way for him to start his next journey. “I can't give you a date, [but] for the better part of a couple of years now, it was on my mind," he says of his departure from WWE, which shocked the wrestling world just a week prior. 

"You know as an athlete, I'm sure in any sport, you know when your contract is coming up. When that happens, you have to start to have discussions. For me, personally, those discussions are with my wife and the family, no one else.” In one of those happy, seemingly regular coincidences that happen in pro wrestling, Ciampa's WWE contract ran out, and the same week he got to take a few hours out of his vacation — and blossoming bromance with Google — to secure his next, and possibly final stop.

“I'm 20 years deep in this. I got 10 years left," he says. "That's my goal, 10 years left. I started to say, ‘What do I want that last 10 to look like?’”

That look, as the world saw on Jan. 28, was “Psycho Killer” and the brand-new theme AEW in-house producer Mikey Rukus cooked up. A stunned crowd, this writer included, watched Ciampa enter the ring on "AEW Dynamite" and immediately engage his former Ring of Honor rostermate Mark Briscoe, leading to a title match a few days later from which Ciampa emerged as the promotion's new TNT Champion.

The three-day whirlwind was part of a creative resurgence for Ciampa, who took the last two months to plot out his next move. He'd already decided he wasn’t going to re-sign with WWE, and so he started to dream up what was coming next. “If I didn't get to stay at home those last six, eight weeks, I think none of this would have happened in the time and manner that it did," Ciampa says.

"Let's get a new logo ready. Let's get the new gear ready. Let's find songs that are meaningful to me that I really like, so that when the time comes that I can get with somebody, I can give them this. I just had so many things prepared — the vision of how I wanted the entrance to look, the Tron to look. To hook up with Mike Mansury, who I used to work with anyway, it was just the best rift session ever. Dude, these guys had 36 hours to do this, and they're just creative geniuses. They just crushed it.”

Ciampa was one of the last WWE roster members left from NXT's Black and Gold era, Triple H’s heralded spiritual successor to the 2010’s generation of Ring of Honor. He found early success with lifelong dance partner Johnny Gargano, both as one-half of the fabled tag-team DIY, then as bitter rivals. He won the NXT Championship in the summer of 2018, dubbing the title “Goldie” — and while not a direct reference to "Sin City," he defended his strap with the same fervor of a hulking Marv. Ciampa wasn’t just a champion — he was a motivated despot, and that belt was the key to that golden, leathered fortress that had no entrance, no exit and absolutely no vacancies.

Ciampa’s creative peak was quite literally birthed from another blessing. At the same time he was coming up with his "Blackheart” persona in 2018, his wife was pregnant, giving him a kind of paternal duality, both in his hopes for their child and what he wanted his championship reign to represent. That belt mattered because his baby mattered, and Ciampa made sure we understood how much he valued the things he held close. “When I won Goldie, my wife was pregnant with Willow, and she was six months along," he recalls. 

"Willow is an IVF baby, and we've had six failed attempts before. And she was our last embryo, and she was everything — and she is everything. So it's a very easy transition for me to take real life and to put it into that title. I also had time — I had nine months [out with injury] to envision what that character looked like, what he thought like, what he talked like, what his mannerisms were, what his style was, get my physique where I wanted it to be. Sat in a lot of classes with Shawn Michaels, who was just the most brilliant teacher I've ever had, and I just really was able to create the vision. 

"And this is no different, I think, than what's happening now, because for years I've been told that 2018 was prime Ciampa — and it makes me sick to my stomach, because I'm better than that guy. I'm better on the mic than he was. I'm better in the ring than he was. My psychology is 10 times better than his ever was, my storytelling ability. And I just needed an opportunity. 

"What I created with the 'Blackheart' is going to pale in comparison to what 'Psycho Killer' is going to do. This is something I've been working on in the trenches for years."

Tommaso Ciampa, the guy who bred “Goldie,” with a giraffe named Google at his beck and call, wants you to understand how good he is — and how bad he wants to tussle with the very best in the world. 

That same ROH class from the 2010s, that same NXT Black and Gold generation, almost to a man, has found their way to All Elite Wrestling. Even as an NXT Champion and WrestleMania participant with eternal frenemy Gargano, Ciampa had his eye on the competition, knowing that his particular talents and relationships would fit into what was being built over in Jacksonville. 

“Man, I tried to make a Cody Rhodes list,” he says, referencing the former Undisputed WWE Champion’s handwritten breakdown of who he wanted to face once he went independent. “I tried to keep it to 10, and I couldn't, I couldn't. I started looking at the page and I was like, 'I can't on this roster page.' There's so many. First time ever, Will Ospreay, Kenny [Omega]. I got Kyle Fletcher, Jon Moxley. I mean, that's ridiculous. Just naming those four is ridiculous, [and then] Claudio [Casignoli] ... the real UFO Claudio.”

It never quite added up for many of those Black and Gold/ROH alumni on WWE’s main roster. Ciampa, in particular, felt wasted. The stigma of “this guy can’t talk” or “this guy isn’t the right size" seemed silly; Ciampa made everything he touched more important, and every move, every strike count. In a world of people trying to reach televised sociopathy, Ciampas grabbed that brass ring and ate it whole. He cared in a way you can’t teach, a way you have to feel.

But even with the success of his “draft class” in AEW — the Undisputed Era, Ricochet and so many others — Ciampa, ever the artist, with a heart blackened by the understanding of solidarity, is making sure he runs his own race. “Our characters, our personalities, our real life, who's married, who's not, who's got family at home, who wants to be on the road — there's just so many variables," he says.

"For the last 10-plus years, I've been going, 'What if? What if I had a platform? And what if I was able to see this thing through?' It was very clear that wasn't going to happen where I was. I tried and it just wasn't in the cards. I just had to get to that point of going, 'Let's just bet on ourselves on this one. Let's find out.' Because I'm either right or I'm wrong. If I'm wrong and I fall on my face, at least I can look at my kid and go, ‘Hey, dad tried. Dad chased it. Dad didn't say what if.’ If I'm right, then, boy, is this thing going to pay off for us in more ways than one — creatively, financially, that satisfaction.”

Ciampa is 40 years old, bald and bearded, with the fun running joke — courtesy of R-Truth — that he’s a visual facsimile of his former boss, Paul "Triple H" Levesque. 

He’s spoiled, from both his own exploits and the gifts of his and Levesque's shared Northeastern upbringings. As he celebrates a new championship in a new company, he also gets to watch Drake Maye — who survived three of the top-five defenses in NFL, brags a proud Ciampa — do his damndest to bring a seventh championship to his hometown. But he’s not a Triple H, he’s not a Tom Brady, he’s not a Robert Kraft. He’s never expressed executive aspirations. Ciampa simply wants to fight the very best. He wants to test his mettle against any and all comers, and continue to find new ways to impress and amaze.

AEW, for a lot of wrestlers — in particular that ROH class — is a passion project. It’s a love letter to the beautiful partner they all first pursued, and now that they have a chance to truly court her, they're doing all they can to make sure she’s appreciated. “All Elite Wrestling is still in [its] infancy, 6 years old, and it was built by a bunch of guys that I have the utmost respect for," Ciampa says. "And what it's done for professional wrestling, I don't think people give it the credit for. I think 20 years from now, people are going to look back and start to understand it. So for me to become a part of that team, I want that to become my family away from home. I want to wave that flag.

"I want to be a part of that movement, and I'm willing to work my way through that. I told them the first time we had a discussion [in late January], I ain't here for a cup of coffee and I ain't going anywhere. This is it, man. Final stop. We've got 10 years. Let's see what we get out of it.”