Exclusive: OWE VP Discusses AEW Visa Situation, How Toronto Show Came About

OWE has had a big year, and it looks to get even bigger.

The Oriental Wrestling Entertainment company became known by many in North America earlier this year, when AEW announced they’d entered a partnership together. Now, on August 7th and 10th in Toronto, OWE looks to make an even bigger impression on the continent as they take Toronto during Summerslam Weeekend.

OWE VP Michael Nee spoke with Fightful for an exclusive interview and opened up about the huge process of running their first 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,” said Nee.

As mentioned, OWE is partnering up with SMASH Wrestling to help promote the event, which was aided in big part by James Snelgrove. James, who was also on the call with Fightful, explained how the idea first came about

“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,” Snelgrove.

OWE has had a presence at every AEW thus far in the form of CIMA, but according to Nee, there were supposed to be several more names who were there. 

“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,” said Nee.

In addition to OWE talent, there are several AEW names set for the cards, such as SCU and The Dark Order. 

OWE Toronto takes place the afternoons of Wednesday, August 7th, and Saturday, August 10th at the Midtown Event Theatre at 3 PM EST. You can purchase tickets for the 10th at this link. You can save 30% off of tickets for the 7th by using the code “FlyingPrince.” Fightful will have coverage of the event.