This week, AEW released a number of wrestlers, including Dalton Castle’s Boys, in an unusual round of cuts.
On Thursday’s ROH Supercard of Honor media call, AEW President Tony Khan stated that The Boys (Brandon/Brent Tate) were let go after both failed to show up to work on multiple occasions, forcing him to make the difficult decision. Brandon replied, “Far from true. Stay tuned..”
The Boys have since issued the following public statement via Twitter:
“We had planned to stay quiet publicly about our release to take nothing away from the biggest show of the year for ROH in Supercard tonight out of respect to the locker room that will be on it. Due to Tony’s comments and the numerous fans, media outlets, friends and coworkers that have reached out to us, that isn’t an option for us anymore. We want to apologize to the Ring of Honor fans and to the AEW fans that were invested in the storyline and were expecting the both of us to be there.
With so many fans wanting answers in addition to numerous people that have voiced their comments at the thought of us really just no showing on the some of the biggest opportunities of our lives due to Tony Khan’s statements, here it is.
My brother and I were told that we would be included in this story through Supercard and there were plans for us to be with John and Taya leading up to the show. We were asked to pitch several ideas for ourselves insinuating we would get the opportunity to show that we can wrestle more in the future.
On March 16th, our scheduled date following “Dalton losing custody”, for the first time in our history of flying in North America previously with Sinclair ROH and now Tony Khan’s ROH, our travel was booked out of Nashville instead of our home airport of Knoxville. (The screenshots of this interaction with management and travel including the times are in the comments.
On Monday April 1st, we were contacted by management accompanied by HR on a call to inform us of our release due to “budget cuts.” At that time we raised concerns and repeatedly questioned if the release was due to the travel issues, we were repeatedly and adamantly assured that this was not the case and based solely on budget cuts.
Since Tony’s statement, we reached out yesterday providing the specific details asking for Tony to clear this up. We have gotten no response. Unfortunately in the court or public opinion for a lot of people commenting, it’s assumed that we’re guilty from 1 man’s words until we now have to prove we’re not.
We’re now forced to release this info along with the screenshot proof to keep people from putting us down on social media or on this evening’s show. We understand that putting this out is detrimental to our careers but our back is against the wall on this and it was either this or let Tony Khan go on saying we no showed.
We want to thank each and every fan who has reached out and made your voices heard as well as the locker room members who have reached out that know the truth as well. We hope you all still enjoy the show this evening for the sake of the wrestlers putting on their best and appreciate how much we’ve seen that people really care about two boys who were always considered replaceable.”
Here were text message screenshots that were also included: