Kevin Owens and Curt Hawkins Defend Indy Promotion Based In Ohio

On Thrusday, a new podcast entry came out on Fightful.com in which Matt Riddle had explained his falling out with Absolute Intense Wrestling. AIW is based in Ohio, and has a very good track record there. Curt Hawkins and Kevin Owens have once appeared for shows there, among many other current and former WWE signed stars. 

Riddle is saying that he was booked without confirming dates, among other reasons. After the episode came out, Fightful was able to successfully reach out to the owner, John Thone.

"Honestly, this all came out of left field. He never made any indication that he was unhappy with anything. He was always a super polite guy, really laid back and chilled out. He was very like, I don’t want to say soft-spoken, but he never questioned anything or said anything. I had booked him for a ton of dates back in August. This is kind of how this whole ordeal started this week. We announced his match for 12/30 and then I get a text from him saying, ‘Hey, I never confirmed that date,’ and I took an actual screenshot confirming the date. I sent it to him and said, ‘Hey, you confirmed the date back in August.’ Those little iPhone bubbles started going up like he was responding and he never responded and then yesterday morning,

I woke up and I had, what I considered, a pretty rude text message of him complaining of how he was booked and how he has been misused in AIW and he does not want to come back and I need to remove the advertisement right now. I was honestly really shocked, because he never indicated he was unhappy or he had a problem doing anything. He was a guy we wanted to book. I sent him our entire 2017 schedule and I wanted to book him full-time. So it kind of caught me off-guard,"

Kevin Owens and Curt Hawkins have both tweeted about this incident, siding with AIW. Below are the tweets. Owens is responding to Hawkins tweet, obviously. 

This is correct. https://t.co/N9jTIoy2EN

— Kevin Owens (@FightOwensFight) December 9, 2016

. @aiwrestling is pure fun. The fans, the locker room, & the promoters are all great. Anybody who says otherwise is delusional.

— Brian Myers (@TheCurtHawkins) December 9, 2016