According to Doc Gallows, WWE wanted a true wrestling monopoly.
In April 2016, Gallows, along with his tag team partner, Karl Anderson, signed with WWE. During their four years with the company, they were Raw Tag Team Champions twice. On April 15, 2020, they were released due to "budget cuts brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic."
Appearing as the guest on a recent episode of the MCW Cast, Gallows shared that during his time in WWE, he heard of a philosophy in which they wanted to control all of the indies and have everything produced through them.
"I did hear this; I’m not gonna drop anything here but I mean I know at one point, there was a philosophy in WWE when I was working there that they basically wanted to control all the indies and have everything self-produced through them. This was before AEW had officially launched and that was kind of the plan," Gallows said. "They were trying to buy, like say Ring of Honor for example. I don’t know if that’s one of ‘em but they probably tried. Luckily these people held out, they said no. AEW happens and now we’re sitting, it’s fruitful for everybody which is really important because if it’s a monopoly, we all know it’s boring, it’s less interesting to watch."
AEW launched in January 2019, and held their first PPV, Double or Nothing, in May of that year. Their weekly TV series, Dynamite, premiered on TNT just five months later in October.
Gallows and Anderson currently serve as the IMPACT World Tag Team Champions. They recently defended their titles against FinJuice (David Finlay & Juice Robinson) and Bullet Club (Chris Bey & Hikuleo) at IMPACT Bound For Glory on Saturday, October 23.
Fightful's Sean Ross Sapp interviewed Gallows not long ago. Their conversation can be seen here.
h/t to Andrew Thompson and POST Wrestling for the transcription.
