-- AEW recently announced that they will be running shows on three consecutive nights at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City in December with an ROH PPV, a live AEW Collision and then an AEW Dynamite taping Friday through Sunday. Previously announced though at the same venue is a show being held on January 19 by Game Changer Wrestling (GCW) and their owner Brett Lauderdale gave his thoughts on AEW coming in and holding their shows less than a month before his, calling it not a great situation for his indie promotion. Speaking on The Business of The Business" podcast, he stated:
"Well, I don’t know Tony Khan personally and I don’t know enough of their people well enough to know or to speculate that they would particularly do something like that just to hurt us. Now, with that being said, you know, the traditional etiquette would be: there’s a window where you don’t go to the same buildings. Should that window exist? Often times, you can call it an unwritten rule, or in many cases it’s a written rule. And I’m sure most of the venues, when AEW goes to venues, they probably have a rule written in that no other wrestling show can go there within 30 days or 60 days. It’s a pretty standard practice in the wrestling business, and a lot of entertainment industries there’s rules like that, both written and unwritten."
"Do I think that they literally set out to look for a way to hurt GCW? I’m not ready to go that far with it. But do I think that maybe it wasn’t the most polite thing to do? Maybe. I mean, they are a billionaire company with endless resources and they run multiple television shows every week, so they could run an event there anytime they wanted. They don’t have to do it in December or January or whatever. They can do it in February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September. They could do it every month if they wanted to. But they chose to do it in late December, which happens to be less than 30 days before we’re there. So, I mean, it’s not the greatest of circumstances for us."
"People going to our show just because it’s a wrestling show at the Hammerstein Ballroom, that’s off the table now. So, yes, we do have to win people over. We do have to sell our card. And, yeah, of course, we have to give a card worthy of the attention and worthy of the prestige of being there. And we have to make people buy tickets. Yeah, that’s the game plan. We’re working on it. We’ve got ideas. I think we’ll start to see some of the picture start to come clear this weekend, and we’re working on it and trying to make the rest of it come together."
Thanks to f4wonline.com for the transcription
