@ShredderLivesOn

6 months ago

I'm amazed that anyone was prepared to do business with 1PW after 2007 and the scam they pulled when they were scheduled to run a show with The Great Muta as the main draw. Stephen Gauntley was in charge then, and he suddenly announced that 1PW was going out of business and couldn't refund fans or honour the contracts with wrestlers. Despite the fact that the event had sold close to 1,000 tickets by that point. The guy I felt sorry for in that whole mess was Len Davies who ran RQW. Davies went into the hole financially to try and salvage the booking with Muta, and the reputation of the British scene. As the Japanese press had already written articles saying that Britain was dangerous for Japanese wrestlers to do business with. Davies even went as far as honouring tickets for the 1PW event as well. So didn't even recoup much from ticket sales. Muta wrestled Martin Stone (Danny Burch in WWE) for RQW in front of about 300 people in York Hall. Which was nowhere near the roughly 1,500 that 1PW would have been looking at in the Doncaster Dome. Meanwhile Alex Shane puts together a deal to get a show running in the Doncaster Dome under the 1PW banner to replace the show which Muta was supposed to be booked on. But they have almost none of the originally advertised big name import talent. Which included Steve Corino, Samoa Joe, Dustin Rhodes, and Colt Cabana. Chris Hamrick and Tracy Smothers had also cut ties with 1PW a few months earlier, because 1PW had repeatedly dicked them about on bookings. Hamrick and Smother wouldn't come back until late on in 2007. The Alex Shane version of the 1PW show goes off well enough, to where they still drew a little over 1,100 people even without Muta. And HALLELUJAH! Stephen Gauntley miraculously figures out that 1PW can stay in business. He's always been a con-man. And unfortunately there will always be people like him, or Danny Rodd on the British scene. It doesn't matter how many warnings people post. Wrestlers will still take the bookings, and unfortunately fans who didn't know about the scams but might see 'FORMER WWE STAR *insert name here*', are still going to buy tickets.

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