VP of OWE Talks About Issues Getting Visas For Talents To Compete At AEW Double or Nothing

In an interview with Fightful, OWE Vice President Michael Nee spoke about the difficulties in getting visas for several of the company’s talent as they were meant to appear at AEW Double or Nothing in May. Here are highlights:

On the first OWE show in Canada: “A couple of years ago James (Snelgrove) told me there’s a chance that Summerslam weekend (would land) in Canada, and he would like to put OWE there. So we start talking about this and we finally decided to go, and we found a venue right after the meeting with AEW back in May. I flew to Toronto to see James and discuss details with SMASH. Afterwards we applied for visas for the Chinese kids. It’s pretty hard right now. We got the support from AEW, they said “hey, they want to support us for whole thing.” So that’s pretty much how the story goes.”

On partnering with SMASH Wrestling: I passed some information about OWE looking for international talent over to the local promotion SMASH Wrestling, run by Sebastian Suave. He approached me a while later because he was putting together a big week of events all at one venue, that was in the week leading up to SummerSlam on the weekend of August 11th. I brought that proposal from SMASH through my connection over to Michael. Michael liked the idea. He came and visited, checked out the venue, looked to be a fairly productive opportunity so that’s how we ended up in this situation.”

On having visa issues before Double or Nothing: “OWE talents, my CEO and me were so excited about this. And also that we were really frustrated by we could not make it to the show in MGM back to May 25th . Of course, we have CIMA, [El] Lindaman and T-Hawk to the showing for AEW. But we (were) supposed to send four-to-six Chinese kids to be at the show. So we were like, “okay, we have this great opportunity for us to show to the world that we have been doing this and it’s something new. New elements from the older wrestling industry. We really wanted to show to the people what’s going on with that. We were thinking maybe there’s opportunity here, so actually this is the very first time in North America that OWE people can go there and show people what’s going on. We are appreciative, grateful and very excited about it.”