WWE Forced MSG to Cancel Ring of Honor’s MSG Show

Ring of Honor announced last week that they would be running a show at Madison Square Garden in NYC some time in 2019. Shortly after, there was a report by Dave Meltzer that WWE was “doing everything possible to block” the show.

Now, it appears that WWE was successful in forcing MSG to back out of the ROH show. In an interview with PWInsider, head of ROH Joe Koff had this to say:

“You know, I’m going to tell you Mike because you are asking. I’m not going to discuss beyond this statement because I am not going to litigate this in the press. We had a deal with [Madison Square] Garden and they then told us they were backing out after communications from the WWE. We are not able to get any other dates in any kind of discussion. I’m expecting that our lawyers will be contacting all the parties involved and the best we can hope is that we can find a resolution, so we can bring the kind of energy and excitement that ROH and our partner New Japan to a bigger audience and to bigger arenas and to the fans of New York City.”

When asked if there was a possibility of another date in the future, Koff said, “There is no date and the discussion is going to end here on that.”

The 20,000 seat Madison Square Garden is seen as sort of a “home turf” for WWE despite them rarely running “big” shows from there anymore, choosing instead to run TV and PPV shows from the nearby Barclays Center in Brooklyn. WWE will be running a house show at MSG on July 7, which features The Undertaker wrestling.