Fuego Del Sol is officially dead.
KJ Orso has been trying to kill that persona for years. The 29-year-old first gained notoriety thanks to his time in AEW. Though he wasn’t featured prominently like some of the big names in the promotion, he had several standout moments that made him feel higher than enhancement talent. Given how over he got at one point in his career, it was surprising that the former Fuego Del Sol didn’t get a decent push out of it. But it sounds as if there was never any TRUE plans for the former AEW star.
Orso discussed his time in AEW during an extensive interview on Busted Open and feels that Tony Khan never saw much value in him beyond enhancement talent.
"I’ve said this in the past. I don’t think Tony Khan ever had any true plans for me. I think the fanfare and the respect I earned from the locker room almost forced his hand to signing me… I am an outside puzzle piece that he just fits in when he wants. ‘You could do some stuff with Sammy. Cody Rhodes really likes you. When Cody wants stuff with you, we’ll do stuff with you and Cody.’ But there was no real plan for me ever. So I’m throwing a thousand pitches at the wall. I put out a video last year where I pitch to join a tag team with Lance Archer. Let me and him have this fun, little dynamic. I pitched me and Sammy (Guevara) becoming a tag team at one point. I pitched going to Japan for DDT just to freshen up my scenery and do something different, and then I pitched taking this mask off and doing something different.
I really do feel that I had become a lovable loser in a sense and there’s a stench I’ve been dying to get rid of since leaving AEW. I feel like I have been doing some of the best work of my career in GCW. Some of the best matches. I constantly would have fans walk up to me after a show and be like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know you were capable of all that. I didn’t know you were that good. I didn’t know that when given some time, how good a storyteller and a wrestler you are’ and I have a burning desire to showcase that to the world and you know, I get it. I was a smaller guy at the time. I’m a Southern man wearing a mask. It’s kind of stereotypical but it’s not normal in wrestling to see someone like me find success so I put on the weight, I really honed in on my speaking ability and I busted my ass in the ring and I feel like Tony didn’t see that and even though I’ve been picking up steam in the past years, a casual wrestling fan is not seeing that. There’s so many hours of television on television right now.
Each week, just between AEW and WWE alone. So how many casual fans are watching the TNAs, the New Japans, the MLWs, the NWAs? Also, Game Changer Wrestling. It’s really difficult to make buzz and no matter how many steps forward I feel like I was taking, I feel like not the right eyes were seeing it and so I needed to do something different and this was that something different and if Tony Khan didn’t see it and the world hadn’t seen it yet, it was my time right now. It was no better time after the 11 years I spent as Fuego Del Sol to really switch things up, flip things on their head and flip the script and get this fresh coat of paint that I’ve been desperately wanting."