Is The Partnership Between Wrestle-1 & OWE A Good Idea?

So it certainly has been a while since I’ve done an opinion article. I believe the last one I did was when Io Shirai announced that she was leaving Stardom for the WWE and we covered some new possibilities as to who would rise up to take her spot. I’ve had a rather hectic week getting stuff ready for my trip which I will get to in my next coverage, but I had some time to think about a different topic after seeing the show involving these two promotions and thought it would be a good idea to talk about the possibilities about this partnership.

If you have read my coverage on Wrestle-1, then you might know the general idea of what is going on and for those that don’t, allow me to fill you in. On the June 13th show, NOSAWA made an announcement saying that it was time to bring some excitement into the company and he said it was why he called a friend to help shake things up and out came the president of OWE, CIMA.

CIMA lends a helping hand…. Uh back… and Gao happily 450s off it! @supercima1115 l @ORIENTALWRESTL1 #OWE #FSWVegas

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— ORIENTAL WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT (@ORIENTALWRESTL1) May 9, 2018

“OWE is known as Oriental Wrestling Entertainment and it is a promotion based out of Shanghai, China with a wealthy film financier funding a promotion from the ground up with ridiculously high end production values with state of the art training facilities for the wrestlers.

CIMA straight up training dudes to do double back handspring Space Flying Tiger Drops here. Wrestling is COOL. #OWE pic.twitter.com/OQFmovyP93

— The Wizard of Loneliness (@GolazoDan) May 6, 2018

Speaking of the wrestlers, they are all local Chinese wrestlers who just so happen to be Shaolin Temple Kung-Fu Students who happen to be some of the most athletic people in the world. Problem is, they didn’t know wrestling existed 9 months ago”, credit goes to Reddit. And it appears as though they have a partnership with Dragon Gate as CIMA seems to be in charge of handling the promotion after Dragon Gate President Takashi Okamura is stepping down from his position due to health-related issues and left CIMA in charge of handling Shanghai, China, and the OWE promotion where he would also take some of Dragon Gate stars with him to help them out such as T-Hawk, El Lindaman, & Takehiro Yamamura. OWE has been posting some of their shows on Twitch for free if you have an Amazon Prime account and I was only able to see one of their shows and while the majority of them are green, the promotion as a whole has so much potential to become a game changer for the business and pulling off some impressive moves that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. With the guidance of CIMA and having a few people there with him to help train these guys, I believe they could go pretty far. Another thing I’ve heard that the majority of the Chinese wrestlers being used there are also technically being prepped to do action films and that makes sense from the crazy stunts that I’ve seen them pulling off here.

During this invasion angle of CIMA and OWE, they called themselves STRONG HEARTS and so far it contains members such as CIMA, T-Hawk, Takehiro Yamamura, Gao Jingjia, Zackery Wentz, & Dezmond Xavier as of right now and they did say they would be making a statement where they made their debut as a unit at the following show on the June 22nd show where they had a clean sweep in their matches and all three of those matches were actually pretty great and it actually did help elevate the company to see something new and exciting. The next time they showed up was on the July 18th show (my birthday) and they would actually lose the match this time which was an eight-man elimination tag match and it did bring some more depth into the rivalry and now you wanna see how it would play out in the end, what would be the big payoff if either one of these promotions win the final match whenever that takes place.

So the question I wanna ask is this, do you believe this rivalry is a good idea? I’m gonna have to say yes since NOSAWA is right to say that it would bring excitement to Wrestle-1 because I will admit that the majority of the shows have been rather lackluster in the majority of their divisions except for the Cruiserweight and guys like Jiro, Ashino, & Manabu and feel like these guys from OWE could help fill in some of those gaps to help elevate some of the division and give the roster a little bit more depth. Another important thing to consider is that this gives OWE more exposure to get their name out there and the possibility of gaining new fans to come and try to follow their product and it’s a great business strategy and while Wrestle-1 is considered an average size promotion, they’re still pretty well known mostly due to the fact that it’s run by Great Muta and has been at least consistent for the five years that it’s been around and now is the time to help elevate it a little bit more while OWE can do the same thing, so I think it’s a great idea for both companies as it’ll hopefully benefit them in the long run.

Gao Jingjia leaps over the top rope to double stomp @OweThawk!@supercima1115 l @ORIENTALWRESTL1 #FSWVegas #DragonGate #OWE

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— ORIENTAL WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT (@ORIENTALWRESTL1) May 9, 2018

What do you guys think? Do you think it’s a great move or you think they should’ve taken their business elsewhere like DDT or AJPW? If you’re interested in checking out OWE for yourself,refer to our previous article covering OWE via it’s partnership with the Future Stars of Wrestling Twitch Channel. I wish the both of them well and excited to see where this could potentially go.