Sabotage Rumours Start After NJPW Show Suffers Major Delays

Tin foil hats on everyone, because there may well have just been some sabotage in our wonderful world of professional wrestling.

So, this past weekend NJPW was having a mini tour across north-eastern America, and Saturday’s show took place in the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. It’s not a tour that was likely going to involve much story-telling, and was much more for US fans to observe some strong style first-hand.

Anyway, the show was supposed to start at 7pm ET, but didn’t actually start until 8.30pm ET due to the lack of an ambulance at the venue. The rules and regulations for these shows state that there must be at least one ambulance at each show, and therefore the first match could not start until that was the case.

Here is PWInsider’s take:

7:57 PM Update – New Japan’s Vice President and Rocky Romero came out and apologized to the crowd for the “technical issues.” They tossed t-shirts to the crowd. Romero asked the fans to bear with them and promised to rock NYC with tonight’s.

Based on numerous sources, here is the problem. The ambulance company that the Hammerstein Ballroom uses for all their events (and used last night for a concert) did not show up as scheduled. The belief originally was that the ambulance was stuck in traffic, but when the venue called the ambulance company to check up on their status, they were told that the ambulance company received a phone call this morning telling them tonight’s show was canceled and therefore they were not needed – and were now not available. Someone involved in the show was able to scramble and get a FDNY ambulance to come to the show and FDNY offered to help and remain until the show could get another ambulance to take their place, so that New Japan could star holding matches. However, we are told that New York State rules would not allow that and everyone is working on getting another ambulance there. The Commission does not allow matches to take place unless there are EMTs with an ambulance present at the venue. As you can imagine, everyone working the show is beyond stressed at the moment.

Thankfully it sounds like it was a great show once it started and the fans in attendance were reportedly very patient and understanding.

However, there have now been numerous conspiracy theories surrounding the events that took place, and some of them make for pretty interesting reading.

So the ambulance company that works EVERY event at hammerstein ballroom gets a random early morning call saying that a sold out event that same night is cancelled & they don’t even double check to make sure its legit before reassigning their crew? Thats a 6-figure mistake. #NJPW

— brett lauderdale (@Lauderdale11) September 29, 2019

So whoever sabotaged the NJPW show would have to be someone who knew that the Manhattan Center uses the same ambulance company for all events, regardless of if they’re wrestling, concerts, kickboxing, etc…

— Bix I got this (@davidbix) September 29, 2019

We are not going to be pointing any fingers here. It could just as easily have been a simple mistake from one of the parties involved.

However, it’s much more fun to speculate.

• Sabotage
• PWInsider
• usa
• NJPW

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