On Monday, WWE was publicly deemed an "essential business" by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The new executive order allows WWE, and any professional sports and media production with a national audience, to hold events as long as the location is closed to the general public.
During his press conference on Tuesday, DeSantis was asked about the decision to include WWE as an "essential business."
"Obviously, WWE, there's no crowd so it's a very small number of people," he said. "We look at it on a case-by-case basis. We haven't had a huge amount of requests. A lot of this will be 'what do we look like in May?' rather than doing stuff now. The one thing I do support is, we do need to support content, especially sports and events. We're not going to have crowds there, I get that. If NASCAR does a race and can televise it, I think that's a good thing. I'd like to see [Tiger] Woods and [Phil] Mickelson golf. That's social distance. I think people are starved for content. We haven't had new content since the middle of March. If people are told to say closer to the house, it sure does help to have fresh things to do. People are chomping at the bit. I think people, to be able to have some light at the end of the tunnel and see things get back on a better course, I think from a psychological perspective, it's a good thing."
DeSantis passed a new executive order on April 9 that classified WWE as an "essential business" in the state for Florida, allowing them to run live shows at the Performance Center. Before the order was passed, the Orange County Sheriff reportedly told WWE to shut things down.
Also on April 9, Linda McMahon's Super PAC committed $18.5 million to the state of Florida.
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