Kenny Omega On Issues With NJPW, Nick Jackson Talks Problems With ROH

As previously noted, Kenny Omega and Michael Nakazawa were recently guests on AEW's Wrestlers On The Road Ordering Room Service. Among many other things, Matt Jackson of The Young Bucks talked about the importance of the Being The Elite YouTube series.

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According to Matt, Being The Elite was the gateway to forming AEW, even if they did not know it at the time. Apparently both Matt and Kenny were against BTE in the beginning.

"Being The Elite came after The Elite, and it was Nick's idea. Kenny and I thought it was a terrible idea. We had no idea that this was actually going to pay off one day and that we were going to write for a company one day, and book, and stuff like that. The charm about the show is that it's clearly guys who don't know what the hell they're doing and we have a funny, quirky sense of humor, and you know that Nick edits it. Little did we know that the show was really the ticket to everything. We became more than just wrestlers." Matt noted, "we became people that people knew personally."

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Omega talked about his issues with NJPW upon the company learning of Omega's departure.   As new reports have revealed some original backstage plans for NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 14, Omega has said that NJPW has done everything in their power they could to make him look like a bad guy when the company found out 'The Cleaner' was leaving Japan.  

"Once they knew that I was going, they did whatever they could – they did a complete media blitz – to make it look like I was this terrible person," Omega recalled. "Once I picked up on that, it actually inspired me to make a video that I made. Yeah, some of my good friends in real life, Toby Fox, the guy who made Undertale, he helped me write the script for this game idea. I funded the whole thing because I knew it wasn't going to get cleared [by NJPW]. I was like, 'okay, we're clear, here it is. I even edited it for you. It's all done.' And they're like, 'no, we're not showing it.' And I was like, 'you're not showing it?' Yeah. I'm like, 'well, what do you want me to do then?' And they're like, 'well, the President doesn't like it. Gedo doesn't like it.' Okay. So I said, 'okay, thankfully, I own it, so here you go, Nick.' We put it up on BTE. It got a ton of media, press. It went viral right away. And then, New Japan hits me up like, 'so if we, like, edited the parts we didn't like, could we use that video because I'm noticing it's, like, getting a lot of traction. Could you actually give it to New Japan World?' And I'm like, 'oh, I'm sorry, I already gave it to Nick.'"

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Nick said it was a difficult time as The Young Bucks parted ways with Ring Of Honor just before that.
 
"It was a rough month because before that we pretty much had gotten kicked out of Ring Of Honor. And, of course, we were leaving, but it felt like we were physically kicked out." Nick added, "we were all depressed."

During this episode of Wrestlers On The Road Ordering Room Service, Omega divulged that he has contractual permission to work elsewhere while with AEW. This was a provision he added to ensure he could continue on working with New Japan in some capacity.

"I think the part that was strange for me was that I had always made clear that being a part of Japan or having roots in Japan was important to me," Omega explained. "And that I was there to help them, anybody at any point in time for the long run, and I had it written into my contract with AEW to do so."

Nick said The Young Bucks have a similar contract provision in their AEW deals, and that they offered to work with ROH and NJPW, but nothing ever came of such conversations.

"We did too [include similar contract provisions]," Nick said. "Even after all this had happened, we had meetings with ROH and New Japan to say, 'hey, we're open to working with you guys – let's do this' and nothing happened, even after all that."

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Check out the show here or in the video above. If you use any of the quotations that appear in this article, please credit Wrestlers On The Road Ordering Room Service with an H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.

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