Don Callis Says He Was Offered To Work On WWE Creative

Don Callis Says He Was Offered To Work On WWE Creative

Don Callis has become a very influential person in wrestling over the last few years. Since he started working for New Japan Pro Wrestling he was able to bring Chris Jericho to the promotion. After that, he has been an executive for Impact Wrestling where he has helped put together the promotion’s working relationship with AEW.

Now, Callis has revealed that he was offered to work on WWE’s creative team. Here is the full quote from his recent interview with Chris Van Vliet, courtesy of Fightful:

“If you were to look at a couple of promos I did in WWF in 97. I was, I think the first person maybe one of the first people anyway to come out as I was a total unknown and I came out in one of my first promos I did in on a live Raw was, not calling out a wrestler, I called out Vince McMahon. I said that I wanted to run the World Wrestling Federation. I wanted to run the wrestling business and people thought, ‘oh that’s an interesting kind of bullet point’ or whatever.

“But it was true. I never had an interest in being a pro wrestling manager or being a color commentator. I wanted to be the person pulling the strings. I was twenty-nine years old when I said that and I don’t think the time was right. Vince McMahon was clearly not a guy who was going to allow other people into the tent they had they had offered me jobs to move to Stamford on three different occasions which I turned down. But that’s always been the goal. You don’t want to be the person acting in the movie. You probably want to be the studio or the person that finances the studio that finances the movie.”

“As I recall I was one of the first people ever to I wrote six weeks of television for Kurrgan to try to get him to a different level and I wrote it out in a week-by-week format that would be fairly common now, in 1997, it was pretty unheard of for a wrestler to write out his creative in the way of formatting that we do now when we write episodic TV. So that was new and different and they were like ‘Oh, maybe you should be on creative.’ I did not want to be boxed into working in a cubicle for anyone in any office anywhere doing anything. So I just kind of pushed back and said, ‘that’s not why I signed here. I signed here to be a wrestler.’ Ultimately, that didn’t work out. But we’re all a product of our time in the business. So all of those things I think grow us as people.”

Don Callis and Kenny Omega have been an on-screen pairing since Omega won the AEW Championship. They have appeared together in both Impact and AEW with Callis calling himself “The Invisible Hand”.

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3 years ago by Tempest

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