AJ Styles

AJ Styles (Allen Neal Jones) is a retired professional wrestler known for being one of the best in-ring performers of his generation. He was born on June 2, 1977, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and grew up in Gainesville, Georgia. Styles had a tough childhood and grew up poor, but he found his passion in professional wrestling at a young age.

Styles had his first match in 1998 for National Championship Wrestling (NCW), where he wrestled under a mask as “Mr. Olympia”. By late 1999, he had adopted the ring name AJ Styles, and by 2001, he made his way to World Championship Wrestling (WCW) as part of a tag team called Air Raid with Air Paris. When WWE bought WCW that same year, Styles tried out for the company but wasn’t offered a contract. Rather than let that setback slow him down, he continued working across the independent scene and quickly started turning heads.

His big break came in 2002 when he joined Ring of Honor (ROH) and, at the time, NWA-Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA today). Over the next eleven years, Styles became the face of TNA and earned the nickname “Mr. TNA”. He was the very first X Division Champion, and he would go on to hold that title six times.

He also won the NWA World Heavyweight Championship three times and the TNA World Heavyweight Championship twice, becoming the first wrestler to complete both the TNA Triple Crown and the TNA Grand Slam.

In 2010, he became the first TNA wrestler to be ranked number one on the PWI 500, a yearly list of the top 500 wrestlers in the world. During this same stretch, he also became the first-ever ROH Pure Champion.

After leaving TNA in late 2013, Styles went overseas and signed with New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW). He made an immediate impact, winning the IWGP Heavyweight Championship in his very first match in May 2014 by defeating Kazuchika Okada. He quickly rose to become the third leader of the popular Bullet Club faction, leading the group for nearly two years and helping raise its worldwide profile.

In February 2015, he captured the IWGP Heavyweight Championship for a second time by defeating Hiroshi Tanahashi. His two-year run in Japan proved that he could succeed on any stage in the world and earned him the Wrestling Observer Newsletter’s Wrestler of the Year award in 2015.

Then came the moment fans had waited years for. In January 2016, Styles made a surprise debut at the WWE Royal Rumble, kicking off a ten-year run with the biggest promotion in wrestling. He quickly rose to the top, winning the WWE Championship twice, including one reign that lasted 371 days. He also won the United States Championship three times, the Intercontinental Championship once, and the World Tag Team Championship alongside Dragon Lee in late 2025.

Along the way, Styles earned WWE Grand Slam Champion status and headlined major events, most notably WrestleMania 36, where his Boneyard Match against The Undertaker became one of the most talked-about matches in recent memory. He was voted PWI Wrestler of the Year three years in a row from 2016 to 2018 and was later named Wrestler of the Decade in 2020.

Styles officially retired from wrestling on January 31, 2026, after losing a career-on-the-line match against Gunther at the Royal Rumble, the same event where his WWE journey had begun ten years earlier.

On the February 23 episode of Raw in Atlanta, Georgia, he gave an emotional farewell speech and left his gloves and jacket in the ring as a final goodbye. The Undertaker then made a surprise appearance to announce that Styles would be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame Class of 2026.

Over a 28-year career that took him through every major wrestling promotion in the world, AJ Styles built a legacy with his amazing in-ring ability, his consistency, and his gift for delivering great matches no matter where he performed.