Impact Wrestling Vice President Don Callis recently spoke with Paul Lazenby on an episode of the Killing The Town podcast about Impact accepting Chris Jericho’s invitation for his cruise in October and the possibility of challenging Ring Of Honor (ROH). Featured below are some of the highlights.

On Sami Callihan’s recent comments and Chris Jericho’s upcoming cruise: “So we’re doing the press conference and Austin Aries is there, Moose, Madison Rayne, Gail Kim, and then Scott D’Amore, Ed Nordholm and myself were up on stage as the executive team and interestingly I figured most of the questions if not all would be about Slammiversary but we did get one question about Sami’s comments, and I guess there were more but after the one person asked then the others kinda let it go but they wanted to talk to me afterwards about it because I kinda hung around and talked to about 50 reporters there. The question was ‘What do you make of Sami’s comments?’ and I hadn’t had a lot of time to think about it because I was just real busy with TV but I basically said, ‘I think for once I kinda find myself agreeing with Sami.’ I’ve never really talked to Chris about it because I haven’t had time the last few months but it’s like, ‘yeah, why isn’t IMPACT Wrestling on there?’. Forget my nearly 30 year friendship with Jericho, you’ve got Ring Of Honor and no one else and we know that sometimes those guys like to do things on their own and I’m sure there’s a reason for that but that’s not IMPACT’s kinda thing so I was like, ‘yeah that is interesting’ and so I kinda said at the press conference that I felt like maybe there was something to Sami’s comments and we may have to investigate that further and then Ed Nordholm, the president of IMPACT Wrestling, basically just piped up and said, ‘Well I think you guys are being too politically correct here. Yeah Sami’s right, we should be there and by the way we’re going.’ So I don’t know what that means other than I guess IMPACT Wrestling in some form or fashion is going on this cruise as Ed’s the boss and he says we’re going so I don’t know what form that’s gonna take. I assume that means Callihan is going which is disturbing. Just what you didn’t want. He worked himself into a shoot to apparently but with Sami, you shot yourself into a shoot.”

On what other talent will be going: “I don’t know what other talent. We haven’t had discussions about it but I see Jericho’s been tweeting about it. Well I’m used to dealing with Chris so I’m sure thats gonna be fine. We’re not gonna buy our own cabins.”

On the possibility of Impact Wrestling vs. Ring Of Honor on the cruise: “I think, to use Sami’s language, ‘If Chris and Ring Of Honor have the intestinal fortitude to step up and say, ‘Yeah we’ll accept that challenge’, I think it’s what’s best for the Jericho Cruise and it’s definitely what’s best for the fans because you can see people love interpromotional, we’ve been doing Lucha Underground, we’ve got IMPACT vs UK coming up, so we’ve already been doing that stuff, breaking those paradigms of professional wrestling, that whole insular mentality of ‘we only work with who we work with’ etc. I think that we’re in a position now with this where there are some really cool stuff for the fans. IMPACT vs Ring Of Honor could be very interesting and I’ll be interested to have some internal discussions about who we might take on that cruise ’cause I don’t know other than Callihan and who knows whether he’s available or allowed to travel internationally. I think that it’s an interesting thing that it’ll be the first time that you’ve really got Ring Of Honor in kind of the same… very enclosed space, I guess you’d say, with IMPACT Wrestling. Who knows exactly what is gonna happen with that. Should be interesting, we’ll see what happens.”

Check out the complete podcast at PodcastOne.com.

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