Karl Anderson recalls working at the Tokyo Dome while under WWE contract.
Following their release from WWE in 2020, Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson went back to New Japan Pro-Wrestling and IMPACT. Fast forward to 2022, which was after The Good Brothers worked with Impact for nearly two years, there contracts were coming up.
Anderson explains that he and his partner opted to not re-signed with the promotion as they wanted to focus on working in New Japan. The Japanese promotion was pushing him as a singles star and they gave him the NEVER Openweight Championship.
Anderson got into talks with Triple H shortly after leaving Impact/TNA and the WWE star details the events that led up to the COO giving him a call (Transcript courtesy of Fightful):
"The NEVER Openweight Champion as a WWE contracted superstar. Give me a break." He said on his Talk'n Shop podcast. You’ll never see it again, ever. I think I won the title around July, possibly August, from Tara [Tonga]. Maybe before that, maybe in May, I really can’t remember. People forget too, this was during COVID, when people weren’t even allowed to cheer, especially in Japan. They were still taking the COVID restrictions very, very seriously. I’d landed in Japan and tested positive for COVID, so I got put into a Japanese government hotel for eight nights, got out, had three nights, had three days free, and then went and wrestled Tana. I was so blown up, I could barely breathe at the end of that. I was the NEVER Openweight Champion since, let’s just say July of 2022, I defended it against Tanahashi in let’s just say maybe Tokyo, I’m not sure where. So right before then, our IMPACT contract had ran out in July, so I won the NEVER Openweight Championship in June of 2022. Our IMPACT contract was finished in July of 2022.
We were offered another two-year deal with IMPACT. We decided against that because it didn’t work out the dates that we wanted. We wanted to be able to hit all of the main big shows for New Japan. We kind of wanted to be more focused on New Japan Pro-Wrestling. That was exactly what we wanted to do. If we would have signed that deal with IMPACT, they wanted us to make sure we were in the states for all of the big IMPACT pay-per-views, and it was something we couldn’t promise. So we told IMPACT, let’s just hold off on anything serious until January. So we’ll do New Japan Pro-Wrestling as hard as we can all the way to January of 2023. So our IMPACT deal runs out in July. The very last day of IMPACT, at our IMPACT TV tapings, we get a text message from Triple H. ‘Hey, are you guys free for a chat anytime soon?’ That was out of nowhere. Of course, we’d talked with AJ [Styles] here and there about what days, when we were free, when we weren’t free. But we didn’t know all the inner workings of WWE, and it wasn’t something on our bingo card at all, for us to even think about because we thought we were just gonna go do full-blown New Japan stuff and just stay with New Japan stuff.
Then we the text from Triple H, and we said, well, do you want to talk tonight or tomorrow when we get home? We’re at our very last TV taping today. Hunter said, ‘Yeah, let’s just chat tomorrow when you guys get home, and you’re good.’ We finished up our match with the Motor City Machine Guns, flew home. The next day, Hunter set up a group FaceTime, and we talked. It was like, ‘Are you guys free?’ Yeah, well, we are free. We didn’t have a contract with New Japan. We didn’t have verbal dates Set up. I knew that I was gonna take this NEVER Openweight Championship all the way to the Tokyo Dome and drop it to Tama. But certain dates were not put in place. Nothing was signed, nothing was, ‘Hey, you’re gonna do this or this.’ There was no contract written up, nothing at all. It was all verbal and all handshake. So Hunter asked, ‘When are you free?’ We were like, well, we’re free now, but I have this [title]. He goes, ‘Well, let’s just figure that out, but we’d love to have you guys back now,'" Anderson said.
Anderson dropped the NEVER Openweight Championship to Tama Tonga at Wrestle Kingdom 17. As of now, both Anderson and Gallows are still with WWE, but the former suffered a torn rotator cuff and torn labrum, which will keep him out of action for a good six to seven months.