When OWE first started up in late 2017, Dragon Fu hosted a talent search across the country, looking for the best young Kung Fu practitioners.
They netted a whopping *200,000(!)* applicants from across China, but only 50 among them were selected to train to become pro-wrestlers.
Talking to citizens it sounds like they’ve only lifted it temporarily but morale is high again. If it stayed open for at least another month then that would be great.
I can’t say a whole lot but certain names are going to be appearing in some pretty prominent promotions in the future. Hopefully sooner than later. Deals have been worked out
I haven’t seen much of them lately, but Jingjia has posted pictures of himself like sobbing and shit because of the lockdown, Junjie has lost a lot of muscle mass and Ben has gotten work in his new job I think but he’s definitely being impacted by the lockdown in Shanghai.
@OWE_EngFan All you can say is they have been on lockdown for 2 months and it's affecting their health drastically. All we can do is hope their situation can get better soon
OWE on FITE was an unmitigated disaster. The production team was not equipped for live streaming, a good few of the boys didn’t actually have their full gear because they either didn’t care or they left it in China because they didn’t anticipate the lockdown, creative was a mess.
@MrSalinas619 You did better than I think I anticipated when it happened 😂 It could’ve gone so much worse but it still absolutely should not have happened
I don’t think I have anything else I want to say about OWE. I had a lot of fun working with the company, I met some of my best friends and watched some of my favorite matches thanks to them. My life has improved drastically and I think OWE was a big step for that positive change.
Benji from Hungary still has friends from the OWE roster and that’s fine, they don’t know the whole story if they even know anything, but he’s not a good dude and I hold nothing but disgust for him and what he did. He’s very lucky that he never got called out by his ex-partner.
Universally I’ve heard nothing but positives about Bruce Mao from members of the FITE show’s creative team. They decided to give him the tournament and I think they had planned for him to dethrone Irie. He was very easy to work with for creative, and open to try anything in ring.
The most jarring example of the FITE show’s creative issues was Eddie being booked to wrestle Damon. Eddie was vehemently against that angle. He hadn’t trained for long enough and both he and Damon knew it. Management wanted to end the show with a big swerve and that was that tho
Unless something serious happens I don’t think OWE will ever come back, at least not as OWE. Michael at one point told me that he saw the writing on the wall and was thinking of starting his own promotion in Cambodia due to OWE’s financial success with Angkor Warriors Show & Pub.
I haven’t heard from Michael in over a year and a half. Eddie is living in Cambodia. Damon went insane and I think he’s doing weird antivaxx stuff right now. Junjie, Bad Boy and Jingjia had been working for MKW on and off before the Shanghai lockdown and Irie still has that belt.
I’m still in touch with a handful of the guys, and a few of them have expressed to me that they’d want to wrestle again if the opportunity arose. I don’t know how many of them are in touch with CIMA or anything but there are a few of em that I would imagine thriving in GLEAT now.
With the way Fu talks about OWE on his personal social media I wouldn’t be surprised if he attempted to revive or reboot it, probably with a mostly different crop of talent than the original, but as it is now there is no OWE.
OWE has formally disbanded.
Fu occasionally posts about OWE on his weibo account, and they did get the roster to all celebrate OWE’s anniversary in a video message to fans, but the promotion simply doesn’t exist anymore. A lot of the wrestlers have moved on from wrestling, sadly