With the announcement yesterday that Impact Wrestling would appear on Chris Jericho’s Rock ‘N’ Rager at Sea, Impact Wrestling Vice President Don Callis decided to promote the October event on his podcast Killing the Town. Callis and his partner Paul Lazenby discussed NJPW’s upcoming event and Slammiversary XVI.
Callis and Lazenby also talked about Jericho’s cruise, and Callis hinted at the idea of a feud between Impact Wrestling and Ring of Honor on the ship.
How Sami Callihan and Don Callis got the conversation going:
I’ve never really talked to Chris about it because I haven’t had time the last few months but it’s like, ‘Yeah…why isn’t Impact Wrestling on there?’ Forget my nearly 30 year friendship with Jericho, you’ve got Ring of Honor and no one else and we know that sometimes those guys like to do things on their own, and I’m sure that’s the reason for that, but that’s not Impact’s kind of thing. So I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s interesting,’ and I kinda said at the press conference that I felt like maybe there was something to Sami’s comments.
Ed Nordholm, the president of Impact, basically just piped up and said, “Well, I think you guys are being too politically correct here. Yeah, Sami’s right. We should be there and by the way we’re going.’ So I don’t know what that means other than I guess Impact Wrestling in some form or fashion is going on this cruise. I assume that means Callihan is going, which is disturbing. Just what you didn’t want. He worked himself into a shoot, but with Sami, you shot yourself into a shoot.
Impact vs ROH on the cruise:
I think, to use Sami’s language, if Chris and Ring of Honor have the intestinal fortitude to step up and say, ‘Yeah we’ll accept that challenge’, I think it’s what’s best for the Jericho cruise and it’s definitely what’s best for the fans, because you can see people love interpromotional.
We’ve been doing Lucha Underground, we’ve got Impact vs UK coming up, so we’ve already been doing that stuff, breaking those paradigms of professional wrestling, that whole insular mentality of ‘we only work with who we work with’ etc. I think that we’re in a position now with this where there are some really cool stuff for the fans.
Impact vs Ring of Honor could be very interesting and I’ll be interested to have some internal discussions about who we might take on that cruise, because I don’t know other than Callihan and who knows whether he’s available or allowed to travel internationally.
I think that it’s an interesting thing that it’ll be the first time that you’ve really got Ring of Honor in kind of the same… very enclosed space, I guess you’d say, with Impact Wrestling. Who knows exactly what is gonna happen with that. Should be interesting, we’ll see what happens.
You can check out all the episodes of the Killing the Day podcast here.
H/T to Wrestling Inc for the transcription.
