Tony Khan comments on Claudio Castagnoli’s ROH World Title win.
This past Saturday at Ring of Honor Death Before Dishonor, opening up the main show was Claudio Castagnoli defeating Jonathan Gresham to become ROH World Champion.
It was the first time that Castagnoli won the belt. While making the media rounds to promote the 7/27 AEW Fight For The Fallen show, Tony Khan stopped past ‘Wrestling Inside The Ropes’. He was asked if it was always the plan for Claudio to become ROH World Champion and Khan said that was part of his original plan.
That was part of my original plan, yes [for Claudio Castagnoli to be the face of ROH/ROH World Champion] and I knew there was a chance that he would also be stepping into the Blackpool Combat Club with Bryan Danielson injured. Now Bryan Danielson’s back and the Blackpool Combat Club is truly stronger than it’s ever been, literally with Claudio in the group, one of the strongest men in wrestling and with Bryan Danielson, one of the greatest wrestlers of all-time coming back.
The idea of Ring of Honor and AEW doing an event on the same weekend is not something that Khan sees happening. He likes the format that is in place and does not want to oversaturate one weekend.
Probably not [Khan said about the idea of running AEW and ROH events on the same weekend]. I think it makes more sense to keep them separate events so that we’re not trying to oversaturate the weekend. I think the best-case scenario is to space it out and I thought we found a really good cadence with Double or Nothing and Forbidden Door in May and June and then following up with Death Before Dishonor in July and course in April, we had Supercard of Honor so I think we found a good cadence.
Coming out of Death Before Dishonor, it was reported by Fightful Select that Jonathan Gresham requested his release from AEW/ROH. He had been champion since Final Battle 2021 and defended the title on the independents while ROH was on hiatus.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Wrestling Inside The Ropes with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
