Ring of Honor COO Joe Koff alleges WWE squashed their Madison Square Garden plans
Despite the fact WWE has been doing most of its New York City business in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for the last few years,
rumor was Vince McMahon and his team were not happy Madison Square Garden was taking bookings from other wrestling companies. If a company other than WWE runs a show in the main Garden venue, it would be the first non-McMahon promoted wrestling there in almost a century.
Both
AAA and
Ring of Honor (ROH) have plans to in the coming year. Or, maybe we should say, had plans to. There’s no word yet on the lucha event said to be happening at MSG this fall, but ROH COO Joe Koff
told PWInsider’s Mike Johnson that the date his promotion secured with The Garden in 2019 has been cancelled after WWE got in touch with their contacts at The Madison Square Garden Company.
Said Koff:
“
I’m not going to discuss beyond this statement because I am not going to litigate this in the press. We had a deal with [Madison Square] Garden and they then told us they were backing out after communications from the WWE. We are not able to get any other dates in any kind of discussion. I’m expecting that our lawyers will be contacting all the parties involved and the best we can hope is that we can find a resolution, so we can bring the kind of energy and excitement that ROH and our partner New Japan to a bigger audience and to bigger arenas and to the fans of New York City.”
The
announcement of ROH’s Garden plans came from the CEO of their parent company, Chris Ripley of Sinclair Broadcasting, in
an interview with Baltimore Business Journal. Ripley did not specify a date, but
others reported it was during WrestleMania 35 week while WWE was elsewhere in the greater New York metropolitan area, possibly even
Sat., April 6, 2019 when NXT will be in Barclays for a TakeOver show.
Asked by Johnson about it today (June 19), Koff replied:
“
There is no date and the discussion is going to end here on that.”
WWE has been asked for comment, but there’s no statement from the company at this time.
It doesn’t sound like we’ve heard the last news on this wrestling feud, though.
