10 Times Wrestling Opened The Forbidden Door
AEW President Tony Khan isn't the only billionaire wrestling owner to open the Forbidden Door...
This Young Bucks Vs. Good Brothers programme is quietly fantastic.
Doc Gallows and Karl Anderson decided to stay with "the Fed" rather than join their old stablemates on this romantic AEW venture. In a cruel irony, Triple H leveraged WWE's monopoly against their loyalties and ambitions. "We'll always be there," he is reported to have said. They weren't. Gallows and Anderson were dropped at the merest threat of WWE potentially not recording massive record profits amid a pandemic. The Brothers resurfaced in Impact Wrestling, the door to which was flung open by Kenny Omega through his association with Don Callis. There, the Cleaner was happy to link up with his old Bullet Club brothers. They were valuable.
The Brothers walked right back through the door and attempted to make nice with the Bucks, so out of their minds that they think it's still 2013. In a sense, it is. The Club is for life. But the events of 2019 put a strain on the friendship that recent events indicate - with cracking dramatic tension - never truly recovered.
It's a choice twist on the collector's item cross-promotional deal that handles the ramifications of transgression as much as the transgression itself.
Wrestling otherwise has a history of inter-promotional warfare as rich as it is poor, often in the span of the same programmes. Some doors were meant to stay shut.
Unless...
10. AEW X NJPW
That door was slammed shut for quite evident reasons. Cody, Hangman Page and the Young Bucks revealed the formation of AEW and its logo outside of the Tokyo Dome. Kenny Omega left New Japan Pro Wrestling after an entire expansion, not something the staunchly traditional promotion would simply do, was mapped around his star power.
Kenny Omega and the Elite left New Japan Pro Wrestling, in part, because the level of remuneration was quite shocking - particularly in the case of Omega, whose drawing power was such that it made such an expansion viable on the first instance. Former President Harold Meij was thought of as an "idiot," one AEW source recently revealed. His inability to keep Omega - and subsequent unwillingness to work with or even take seriously AEW - erected what became known as the 'Forbidden Door'. Every bad feeling intensified; the Elite had cause to leave, but the manner of the exit...
Meij's exit unlocked the door, and Tony Khan's canny measurement of the landscape cracked it ajar; he recognised that KENTA was available in Florida to work around ongoing travel restrictions, and that New Japan were keen to utilise Jon Moxley in a long overdue defence of his US Title.
A tremendous future looms, if the world can sort itself the f*ck out. If you're the type of anti-vax dipsh*t that might prolong everything, just think: you're closer than ever to Kenny Omega Vs. Shingo Takagi.
Also, vaccines don't change your DNA and you'd have to be a moron to think that.