Samoa Joe to Make His AEW In-Ring Debut Tonight on AEW Dynamite

By Connor Casey

Samoa Joe made his surprise return to Ring of Honor in the closing minutes of Friday's Supercard of Honor event, followed quickly by an announcement from Tony Khan that the former world champion had signed a deal with both ROH and AEW going forward. It was then announced on Tuesday that Joe will compete in his first match on tonight's AEW Dynamite, taking on The Acclaimed's Max Caster in a qualifying match for the Owen Hart Foundation's Men's Tournament. 

The finals of the tournament will be held at the Double or Nothing pay-per-view next month. Joe made it clear during the post-show scrum after Supercard that he wants to win both the ROH and AEW World Championships. 

"That's why I'm here. I tried my bid at bettering the world of professional wrestling, but at the end of the day, I'm here in AEW and ROH to be a Unified Champion. I'm here to win the AEW Championship and Ring of Honor Championship. I'm here to win anything they put in front of me. I'm more than willing to go into the Owen Hart [Tournament] and win that," Joe said. "This ain't a game anymore. AEW has a lot of feel-good moments, a lot of great wrestlers who respect each other. I don't respect nobody. Until you're in the ring with me. I'm coming out there to smack people in the mouth and take what they have. That's pretty much my edict when I'm here. Broadcaster, mentor, good guy — I am all those things, but not here. Not here."

He also discussed his decision to sign with Khan after being released from the WWE for a second time in January — "At this point, in my career, what I have done, the second release, my going back to WWE was majorly because of the people I had worked with and the relationship I had built in the company, namely Triple H and William Regal. As for Triple H, dealing with his situation, which I knew about and was way more concerned about than my employment, and Regal and his departure, I knew the writing was on the wall for me, which is fine. We were a big collective team and a big collective think tank within the company and they went a different way. As far as the release, it's an up and down process for a lot of people. For me, it just freed me up to pursue a lot of projects that I really want to work on and freed me up to talk with Tony and talk about the future of what he wanted to do and I was very surprised a lot of that matched up,"

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