Scott D'Amore wants to continue taking Maple Leaf Pro to different places in Canada.
After hosting their first four events in Ontario, Maple Leaf Pro will be coming to Toronto for their Northern Rising event. Notably, the event will be hosted at the former Maple Leaf Gardens, a historic venue for the world of pro wrestling.
While speaking with Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful for a recent interview, D'Amore talked about the promotion's decision to run a show at the venue before also detailing his desite to visit other cities in the country.
"That's why we announced in May, we're going to be in Toronto and we're going to be returning to the corner of Church and Carlton Street, which is the former Maple Leaf Gardens, right? It's now called the Matamy Athletic Centre, but it's Maple Leaf Gardens in all of our hearts. It still has that iconic yellow brick. It still has the marquee out front that says Maple Leaf Gardens. It still has you walking in the arena, because I just did the site visit. Even though it's not a 17,500 seat arena anymore—it's a 3,000 and change—when you walk in there and you look up, it's the same roof. It's that same iconic roof that I walked in as a 10-year-old child to go see my first Toronto Maple Leafs game. I think that's going to be a cool, special moment in our history, returning to our spiritual home. But then we want to get out and get to other cities. We're a Canadian brand. going to, we're going be running predominantly and maybe exclusively in Canada for the most part, with exceptions of maybe some co-partnerships or something that may come along. But look from, from Vancouver to Calgary to Winnipeg to Toronto and Ottawa to Montreal—maybe it's time for another screw job, I don't know—out to Eastern Canada. There's so many towns we wanna get out there and do it and get to all of them. But there's a lot of hurdles in that, there's a lot of logistics. So I think this next move in May is a huge one. Going to Toronto, which is obviously the biggest city here in Canada and such an unbelievable wrestling town. You just saw what WWE did there with Elimination Chamber and that moment that they created with John Cena and Cody and The Rock."
D'Amore continued on by teasing some future announcements regarding Maple Leaf Pro coming to other cities.
"Toronto deserves to have Canada's own wrestling brand, Maple Leaf Pro, there in the center of the country and then we spin out from there. So we've got other cities in the mix for later this year, and you'll see some of those announcements starting to come soon. But I'm excited. It's time to branch it outside of Windsor. It's time to get other places. But before we do that, we got two more days where we celebrate Windsor and what it's meant to wrestling. You look at it when we moved IMPACT! out of the studio, which had kind of became a really kind of downer of an environment by the time I got there in 2018. We wanted to take it out on the road and get it to wrestling fans. First place we took it as Windsor because we knew we'd fill the building for a couple of days and we knew that the fans would be loud and rowdy. So we want to celebrate that."
Elsewhere in the interview, D'Amore talked about the importance of maintaing good relationships with other promotions. Check out his full comments by clicking here.
Fightful's full interview with Scott D'Amore can be found in the video linked at the top of this article.
