Impact Wrestling has re-established its partnership with Ohio Valley Wrestling and will look to the company for their stars of the future.
The press release states:
IMPACT Wrestling announced today that it has re-entered into an agreement with Louisville-based Ohio Valley Wrestling to serve as an official development and training territory for IMPACT Wrestling.
The announcement of the renewed partnership follows the success of the co-promoted One Night Only: Clash in the Bluegrass event, a sold-out show from Davis Arena in Louisville, Kentucky, which featured stars from both organizations.
Executive VP Scott D’Amore was quoted in the release saying, “It is great to work with Al Snow and the team at OVW, which has a long history of developing great talent.”
OVW is the former developmental territory for WWE. Alumni include John Cena, Brock Lesnar and reigning IMPACT World Champion Johnny Impact. The company previously was the home for Impact’s developmental talent from 2012-2014.
Snow acquired Ohio Valley Wrestling in June 2018.
According to the announcement, IMPACT Wrestling management will look to OVW when scouting new talent and “those on the development roster will see future opportunities to appear on the flagship weekly show IMPACT!”
Do you want to be part of AEW? Are you librarian-esque? If so, an opportunity awaits.
On the latest episode of Being the Elite … Matt Jackson, Nick Jackson and Cody Rhodes announced an open casting call for a gimmick called “The Librarian.”
Not a lot of details were given on the new character, but the AEW Executive Vice Presidents called for fans who are interested in playing the role to tweet audition videos to AEW that are up-to-sixty seconds in length using the hashtag #TheLibrarian.
Despite how it may have sounded to some … Santino Marella says his comments about transgender women in wrestling were about AMATEUR, not professional wrestling.
As we previously reported, Santino recently spoke on an Impact Twitch stream about how he dislikes intergender wrestling. He then shifted the conversation to transgender women and said “There’s cases now in MMA and wrestling where there’s trans girls that were born boys that are beating the sh*t out of females and that’s wrong.”
Marella reached out to Pro Wrestling Sheet to clarify that he was NOT talking about pro wrestling in this moment. “In legitimate combative sports, I don’t want to see women get hurt unnecessarily,” he tells us. “Professional wrestling welcomes everybody”
Adding, “I consider myself an ambassador to professional wrestling and my view has always been that it is welcome to all, I have gay students. I have trans students. I have students from every race and creed, we are all one big happy family.”
The video of his original comments can be found at link below.
Double or Nothing is still a few months away, but The Young Bucks vs. Lucha Bros went down anyway Saturday night and ended with new tag champs in AAA.
Matt and Nick Jackson made a surprise appearance at AAA’s Rey de Reyes following the main event — which saw Pentagon Jr and Fenix capture the tag titles — and an impromptu match began.
In a shocking occurrence, The Young Bucks defeated their the Lucha Bros to become the AAA World Tag Team Champions after hitting the Meltzer Driver.
The Young Bucks has become the first tag team in history who has won the AAA, IWGP, ROH and PWG tag team championships.
The full show (which also includes an appearance from Cody Rhodes) can be FOUND HERE.
We are working on getting Jerry Jarrett for an upcoming episode of the Wrestling News Blog Podcast. For those unfamiliar with Jarrett, below is some information on his background history in professional wrestling.
Jerry Jarrett is the father of WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett and former co-owner of what was known as the Memphis Wrestling territory. Jarrett is a key figure in the history of professional wrestling in the Mid-Southern United States. Described as a “wrestling genius”, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Alliance Hall of Fame in 2009.
Jarrett founded the Memphis, Tennessee-based Continental Wrestling Association in 1977. In 1989, Jarrett merged his promotion with the Dallas, Texas-based promotion World Class Championship Wrestling, creating the United States Wrestling Association, which Jarrett sold to Lawler in 1997. He made another foray into promoting in 2002 when he co-founded NWA:TNA with his son Jeff Jarrett, selling his controlling interest to Panda Energy International later that year.
Jerry Jarrett was exposed to the wrestling business at a very early age. His mother worked as a ticket vendor, and Jarrett began selling programs for a promotion owned by Roy Welch and Nick Gulas at the age of seven. After receiving his driving license at fourteen, he became a wrestling promoter, renting buildings, advertising shows, constructing the ring, selling tickets, and stocking refreshments. He worked as a promoter until he left Nashville to attend college. Upon graduating, Jarrett worked for Welch and Gulas as an office assistant and became a referee by default after a referee no-showed. He soon returned to promoting, working his way up from local promotions to regional, then national promotions.
While working as a referee, Jarrett decided to become a wrestler and was trained by his friend and future tag team partner Tojo Yamamoto and veteran wrestler Sailor Moran. He wrestled his first match in Haiti in 1965.
Jarrett became a successful wrestler in the South, particularly in his home state of Tennessee, forming tag teams with Jackie Fargo and Tojo Yamamoto.
After a dispute with Gulas in 1977, Jarrett opted to break away and found his own promotion, the Continental Wrestling Association (CWA). With the support of Buddy Fuller, Jerry Lawler and his mother, Jarrett built the CWA into a successful promotion, staging events each Monday that regularly sold-out the Mid-South Coliseum and airing television shows each Saturday morning on WMC-TV. In 1981, NWA Mid-America folded due to competition from the CWA with Gulas selling his territory to Jarrett.
In 1979, The Freebirds wanted Jarrett to allow them to play Freebird on their entrances. They first tried it in the Mid-South Coliseum along with twirling the house spotlights. So Jerry Jarrett became one of the first promoters to use music and videos to promote his roster of wrestlers.
In 1984, Jarrett entered into a talent exchange with Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling promotion. Jarrett and Lawler advised Watts to bring more young performers into his territory to attract a younger generation of fans; especially females since they bring their boyfriends to the shows.
In 1988, Jarrett entered talks with Verne Gagne, owner of the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based American Wrestling Association, about a potential merger. After the talks were abandoned in 1989, Jarrett instead entered into a merger with the Dallas, Texas-based promotion World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW) to create the United States Wrestling Association.
The United States Wrestling Association began promoting shows in Tennessee and Texas in 1989, with Jarrett aspiring to take the promotion national. In 1990, WCCW withdrew from the USWA after a revenue dispute, folding shortly thereafter.
In 1992, the USWA began a talent exchange program with the World Wrestling Federation. By the mid-1990s, attendances at the Mid-South Coliseum had fallen sharply, and in 1995 Jarrett sold his stake in the promotion to Jerry Lawler and Larry Burton.
After stepping back from promoting, Jarrett worked as a consultant for both World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and the WWF.
In 2001, Jarrett put together proposals for acquisition of WCW, calculating that he could return the company to profitability by aggressively cutting costs. The company’s assets were, however, acquired by the WWF after its programming n TBS and TNT was canceled.
After the sale of World Championship Wrestling to the World Wrestling Federation and the bankruptcy of Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), the North American professional wrestling industry lacked a viable competitor to the WWF which Jerry and Jeff Jarrett attempted to fill with the formation of NWA:TNA. On May 9, 2002, the Jarretts announced the formation of J Sports and Entertainment (JSE), the parent company of NWA:TNA, a new professional wrestling promotion that began airing weekly pay-per-views on In Demand on June 19, 2002.
In October 2002, JSE sold a 72% controlling interest in NWA:TNA to Panda Energy. Jarrett remained part of the NWA:TNA management team until departing in late-2005 over a dispute about the direction of the company.
Jerry Jarrett now hosts the podcast Booking Memphis along with Sean Reedy.
We have seen a flurry of activity on the professional wrestling intellectual property front recently with All Elite Wrestling’s Cody [Rhodes], professional wrestling podcaster Conrad Thompson, and professional wrestling great Arn Anderson all filing for trademark applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
On March 10, 2019, Cody Runnels, also known as Cody in professional wrestling circles, applied to trademark the moniker he has used on the indie scene, ‘The American Nightmare’. Of course, ‘The American Nightmare’ is a take on Cody’s famous father’s nickname, ‘The American Dream’, which Cody also applied to trademark on March 10, 2019.
Conrad Thompson, through his business entity, Toot Toot, LLC, applied to trademark ‘Four Horsemen’ on March 10, 2019.
Also of note, recently released WWE producer, Arn Anderson, applied to trademark his ring name on March 9, 2019.
All of these new trademark applications were filed through the same Attorney Of Record, Michael E. Dockins of Toledo, Ohio. We recently reported that WWE Hall Of Famer Jim Ross applied to trademark the phrase, ‘The Voice Of Wrestling’ for appearances and podcasts. Michael E. Dockins is the Attorney Of Record for that recent filing as well.
Santino Marella aka Anthony Carelli has strong opinions about transgender women in sports, as well as men wrestling women, and expressed them on an Impact Twitch stream.
On the latest edition of Behind the Lights with co-host Alicia Atout, the ex-WWE star was asked about his thoughts on intergender wrestling — due to the upcoming ‘United We Stand’ match pitting Tessa Blanchard against Joey Ryan — and he didn’t hold back.
“If there’s a girl out there that says ‘this guy’s giving us attitude, I’m gonna step in and fight this guy because I saw that women can fight men because of intergender wrestling.’ And she goes out there and lips off and this guy’s a mental case and he just cracks her with his fist and shatters an orbital and busts her lip … and she wouldn’t have done it — perhaps — beforehand, because she didn’t get this inflated sense of confidence because of intergender wrestling.”
Carelli says that because of this, he believes there’s a social responsibility attached. He also notes that movies featuring superpowered women aren’t quite the same in his opinion.
The 45-year-old wrestler then goes on to talk about how the news is amplifying issues between men and women — as well exaggerating racial tension — and things aren’t as bad as they seem.
At this point, Santino shifts his attention to transgender athletes. “There’s cases now in MMA and wrestling where there’s trans girls that were born boys that are beating the sh*t out of females and that’s wrong,” he states.
“If you’re a guy — born a guy — and you become a woman, you’re accepted everywhere,” he continued. “But in the field of actual competitive sport, there has to be a barrier. And the barrier is based on, sorry, you were born a God damn man. You’re accepted as a human being and as a person and you are loved in every single way EXCEPT it’s not fair that you compete against women in sports because you were born with different physical biological attributes. And we have to be realistic about it and we also have to not be so sensitive.”
Watch the video at the link below (this conversation begins around the 15.30-minute mark).
Popular comedian, Film Maker and multifaceted talent, Kevin Smith revealed that All Elite Wrestling’s Chris Jericho will be appearing in the reboot of his Jay and Silent Bob film. Smith described the scene that Jericho is in as “stolen from some of the 80’s road movies I grew up watching.”
Although this is the first time Jericho is appearing in a film alongside Jason Mewes (Jay), this is actually the second time that Smith and Jericho have worked on a movie together. Jericho will be a part of the forthcoming horror anthology, Killroy Was Here which was also directed by Kevin Smith.
Smith also mentioned in the Instagram post that they have 8 days left to shoot the remaining third act of the film. The post reads, “I was there when #y2jayandsilentbob happened! Chris Jericho joined the Jay and Silent Bob reboot last week in a scene stolen from some of the 80’s road movies I grew up watching! This was the first time Jason Mewes shared screen time with Chris Jericho but it’s the second time I’ve worked with the Fozzy frontman (the first being on the forthcoming horror anthology #killroywashere). And both times, this super sweet Canadian kid has been cast waaaaay against type. If I ever get to make another movie after this one, I told Chris he’s gonna be a good guy (maybe we’ll finally do that Canadian James Bond comedy we talked about on the podcast that one time). After today, we only have 8 shooting days left on @jayandsilentbob Reboot, which is basically the entire third act. I’ve got 40 minutes of the movie already edited and I’ll cut more this weekend. Thanks to @dpronlevy, the movie is way better than I even wanted it to be (Reboot is easily one of my best looking movies to date). And starting at noon, it’s all cameos all the time from here on out, as fresh famous faces join us every day until we wrap!”
