Fast facts
- Division: Heavyweight (Bellator MMA)
- Record: 3-0 (1) in MMA, retired from MMA in September 2023
- Nationality: American
- Team/gym: No gym listed in available sources; wrestled collegiately at the University of Oklahoma
- Notable wins: J.W. Kiser (Bellator 214, arm-triangle choke, Round 1), T.J. Jones (Bellator 221, arm-triangle choke, Round 1), Dustin Fox (2006 NCAA championships, amateur wrestling)
The best detail in Jake Hager’s whole story has nothing to do with a belt. In 2006 he walked out of the University of Oklahoma with a finance degree and a job lined up at a firm in Dallas. WWE offered him a contract on the day he was supposed to start. He took it, and the guy who almost spent his life in spreadsheets went on to become a two-time world champion in professional wrestling, an undefeated Bellator heavyweight, and, this year, a Power Slap competitor whose left eye ruptured on camera in Lubbock, Texas.
That last part is why his name is everywhere right now. The update is cautiously good, and it’s worth knowing who the man behind it is.
Two blocks from Danny Hodge
Donald Jacob Hager Jr. was born March 24, 1982, and grew up in Perry, Oklahoma, which in wrestling terms is a bit like growing up next door to a cathedral. He lived two blocks from Danny Hodge, wrestled in high school alongside Hodge’s grandson, and stayed close with the old man as he grew up. Hager had started wrestling at five. As a junior in 2000, he won the OSSAA 2A state title at 215 pounds, and somewhere between practices he was in the National Honor Society and got elected class officer three times. Small-town Oklahoma produces a certain kind of kid, and he sounds like one of them.
Oklahoma recruited him for football and wrestling both. On the football side he was a second-string defensive tackle, stuck behind Tommie Harris and Dusty Dvoracek, two future NFL players. He gave up football as a sophomore and went all in on the mat. That choice paid off slowly. At the 2005 NCAA Division I championships he lost to Penn’s Matt Feast in the second round and didn’t place. A year later, as a senior, he finished seventh, beat Northwestern’s Dustin Fox (a future national champion), earned All-American honors, and set Oklahoma’s single-season record with 30 pins. Thirty. A pin is a wrestler finishing the argument instead of winning it on points, and Hager did it 30 times in one season.
Dvoracek mattered off the field too. He was Hager’s close friend and college roommate, and during Hager’s junior year he introduced him to Jim Ross, then WWE’s head of talent relations. Ross told him to get in touch after graduation. The Dallas job never stood a chance.
Jack Swagger
The WWE years are the part most people know. Hager came up through Deep South Wrestling, Ohio Valley Wrestling, and Florida Championship Wrestling, where he unified the FCW heavyweight titles in 2008, before debuting on ECW that September as Jack Swagger. On January 13, 2009, he beat Matt Hardy for the ECW Championship and held it for 104 days. In 2010 he won the Money in the Bank ladder match at WrestleMania XXVI, then cashed in on April 2 against Chris Jericho, who had just been speared by Edge, to take the World Heavyweight Championship. That reign lasted 79 days and ended at Fatal 4-Way on June 20 when Rey Mysterio won the belt. His Money in the Bank rematch with Mysterio a month later was called one of the best matches of that year. In January 2012 he added the United States Championship, beating Zack Ryder, and held it for 49 days.
He left WWE in 2017 because he wanted to fight for real.
The Bellator run
Hager signed with Bellator MMA in 2017, though his pro debut didn’t come until January 26, 2019, at Bellator 214 against J.W. Kiser. He won with an arm-triangle choke in the first round. At Bellator 221 on May 11, 2019, he did it again against T.J. Jones: arm-triangle, Round 1. Those finishes look exactly like what you’d expect from a former Oklahoma pinning machine, a heavy man getting on top and squeezing until somebody quits. He retired from MMA in September 2023 without a loss, sitting at 3-0 (1).
I have no interest in pretending a short heavyweight run was more than it was. But a guy who walked away from a world-title career in his mid-30s to start over at the bottom of a cage sport, and never lost, earned some respect from the people who usually roll their eyes at wrestling crossovers. Pro wrestling kept him busy meanwhile. He worked Lucha Underground as Jake Strong, where he was the promotion’s final champion, and signed with AEW in 2019 under his real name.
Lubbock
Hager signed with Power Slap earlier this year. He split his first two matches, a win and a loss. The third came on September 17 at Power Slap 23 in Lubbock, and it ended with blood coming out of his eye after a heavy strike. The clip spread fast across social media, and Dana White said it was probably worse than any UFC injury he could think of. Hager underwent emergency eye surgery.
The latest news came from an unexpected direction. Nicholas Cvjetkovich, a former WWE wrestler known there as Kizarny and also as Sinn Bodhi, passed along an update that Slap News published on Instagram, as Bloody Elbow reported. According to that post, Hager can see out of his left eye after suffering a globe rupture and a significant globe tear. The same post added a hard caveat: “The extent to which Jake’s vision will be restored is unknown at this time and he may require additional surgeries.”
Nobody has said whether he plans to compete again. Bloody Elbow reported that a doctor advised him to walk away from Power Slap, citing the risk of further damage in a ruleset where you can’t defend yourself.
That doctor is right, and I’d say so even about a fighter I didn’t like. Hager has done the hard things already. He wrestled his way out of a two-stoplight town, out-pinned every Sooner who came before him, turned down a desk job on its first morning, held world titles, and quit a cushy career to go 3-0 (1) in a cage. Slap fighting asks a man to stand still and take it. Everything in Hager’s history, starting in Perry two blocks from Danny Hodge, says he was built to move forward and put people on their backs. The best version of the next update is one where he’s looking at Oklahoma wrestling rooms with both eyes and nobody is lining him up across a podium again.
