Various: Doc Gallows on Differences Between WWE and Impact, NJPW News & Notes, Indies

Jul 29, 2020

Doc Gallows Comments on Differences Between WWE and Impact Workplace Environments

A recent episode of the Sitting Ringside with David Penzer podcast had Doc Gallows as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Gallows thoughts on the differences between WWE and Impact Wrestling’s locker rooms and workplace environments.

“I’ll say this, I was not a fan of Gallows, Anderson and AJ Styles joining WWE in 2016. I’ve said that publicly because I thought we had a good thing going in Japan. But I got there and was pleasantly surprised because the locker room of old had changed, the old guard was gone. It wasn’t everybody was supposed to be walking around on eggshells. I give big credit to Roman Reigns for that. Some of my other buddies like Bray Wyatt and some of the other guys who’ve become big stars there. It was a fun locker room, it was a cool locker room. It wasn’t the locker room vibe necessarily in WWE. It was the vibe of some of the people who were in charge who kinda still liked that, ‘We’re gonna lead through fear and it’s an iron fist and everybody’s supposed to be scared of everything’ but, you have a different set of eyes on that when you’re 22 and you’re 34, 35. Like, I’m not scared of these motherf*ckers or what they think and I’m not gonna cower around everybody and all that stuff. But that being said, I love the vibe of the IMPACT locker room. I love the vibe of, ‘Hey, let’s help each other, let’s pull each other up. Hey, I don’t think that was necessarily the best thing to do there.’ Then give the opinion to the guy because at the end of the day, what do we wanna do? We got great buzz this weekend. We wanna keep great buzz, we wanna keep eyes on this show. So, I mean, I gave a piece of advice at one point. [Tommy] Dreamer gave me a piece of advice at one point. We can’t be close-minded. We’re all learning. The boys were cool, we’re fun. Nashville’s a great city. It’s not all the way open so I couldn’t have as much fun as I wanted which is probably a good thing. But yeah, I loved the vibe of that locker room, loved the vibe of the show, loved the vibe of the tapings. I mean let’s be honest, we put in a hell of a lot of work. We do three episodes a day.”

Transcript h/t: PostWrestling.com

NJPW Announces Partial Card for Summer Struggle, Honma Health Update, & More

New Japan Pro Wrestling recently announced the partial card for their Summer Struggle in Jingu event, which takes place on August 29th at the Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, Japan.

IWGP Heavyweight & IWGP Intercontinental Double Championship match – Tetsuya Naito vs. EVIL (c)
IWJP Junior Heavyweight Championship – Taiji Ishimori vs. Hiromu Takahashi (c)

NJPW also recently announced that they will be holding an online press conference this Friday starting at 10PM EST to discuss details regarding their upcoming new weekly NJPW Strong television series.

As noted before, both Tomoaki Honma and Yota Tsuji were pulled from this past Saturday’s Sengoku Lord 2020 event in Aichi, Japan due to health precautionary reasons for the coronavirus. NJPW announced on Tuesday that Honma and Tsuji had tested negative for COVID-19 and both have been medically cleared to return to the ring.

NJPW reportedly drew a paid attendance of 482 for their Summer Struggle event this past Monday in Tokyo, Japan, according to Post Wrestling.

Misc. Wrestling News & Notes

Major League Wrestling announced that they have recently signed a distribution deal with Digital Original Entertainment to provide content for the streaming network for its upcoming launch on online television service Pluto TV.

Ring of Honor reportedly are currently planning to resume television tapings in the Maryland area once they finalize their COVID-19 health precautionary policy, according to PWInsider.

AEW announced that the first series of their upcoming AEW Unrivaled action figures will officially go on sale at Walmart starting on August 3rd.

DDT Pro Wrestling held a press conference this past Monday to announce that they will be officially merging with Pro Wrestling NOAH into a single company called Cyberfight starting on September 1st. It was also announced that both promotions, as well as Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling and GanPro, will continue to operate as separate promotions under this new company.