On Monday Mailbag with Mike Chioda, the longtime referee discussed how he was brought to AEW to referee Adam Cole vs. Samoa Joe at Double or Nothing.
“Let me tell you how that all came together. I was on a cruise with my wife. We were sitting there on the second day on the cruise and I got a call from Dean Malenko,” Chioda said.
“He said, ‘We came up with a good plan. Everybody liked it. We want to bring you as a special guest referee for the Owen Hart tournament match.’ He said, ‘Did you know Owen?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I knew him very well.’”
“I sent some pictures to him with the one in Israel with 1-2-3 Kid and Tonka in Israel and a couple other pictures. So he wanted me to be the ref and I said, ‘Oh man, that would be great.’ He said, ‘We’d like you to come in and do the match and maybe do the other tournament match’, but there’s a size difference on that. They didn’t want anybody like me being six foot tall.”
