Major League Wrestling CEO Court Bauer was recently interviewed by DAZN to discuss MLW’s restart from their temporary shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Highlights are below.
How he’s excited to get MLW going after confirming that the restart would happen safely”
First off, I’m thrilled that we are going to be back, holding tapings and providing exclusive content to DAZN. People kept asking when we were going to return. Our last show was in Mexico on March 13. Things happen so fast. I think that morning of our show, the NBA decided to temporarily go on hiatus. By that night and the final main event, we knew we were going to be going on hiatus. You don’t know for how long. There’s no way to really chart a course like this. But we knew we would probably be shutting it down for some period of time until we got a sense of where everything was in the world. We really wanted to operate with an abundance of caution for the health and wellness of our athletes, our crew, and our staff. So we didn’t rev it right back up. We wanted to be careful and wanted to take into account the latest developments for treatment, PPE, vaccines, and anything and everything that would give us a better sense of comfort for our fans, athletes, and everyone involved.
On talking with numerous doctors regarding COVID-19 testing, and getting certified trainers:
As time has progressed and checking in with our chief medical advisor, Dr. Schwegler, we started to see some encouraging steps on the treatment as well as the testing and a lot of breakthroughs in the last — including a total breakthrough this week with an instant five-minute test that the FDA approved. The saliva direct test is really a big move. You’re seeing treatment really get better. We have all these vaccines in the mix. We’ve talked with different organizations, our media team, our medical team, going down to Johns Hopkins Hospital to be part of a symposium on the virus and try to get as much information to see how other people have done it with the success they’ve had and things they would suggest, or doing differently. Taking all that into account has been very helpful for us. That’s put us on a track to say, ‘Okay, I think we can start to enter the next phase of this.’ Part of that for us was getting our staff certified training and preparation for that. In terms of the virus, while there’s a whole process you go through to get certified training, a lot of it really is common sense stuff, but you want everyone equipped with the knowledge. Then, of course, bringing in someone in that and oversee this in the trenches. It’s important to have that person really monitoring everything, and having everything set up and helping us prepare our crew or talent in advance of that with all the information, the guidelines, everything, and then starting the testing process.