Tony Khan Did Not Invent The Term ‘Forbidden Door’

Tony Khan delivered on his promise of re-opening the forbidden door on last night’s AEW Dynamite. Jay White of Bullet Club showed up during a backstage segment and sent The Elite into crisis mode. The New Japan Pro Wrestling star looks like he’s ready to start a major shakeup with the group.

The concept of the “forbidden door” has lost it’s meaning to lot of fans. The term has been thrown around to mean anything from Impact wrestlers showing up elsewhere to free agents signing with a different company. The actual origin of the phrase actually dates back to former NJPW Harold Meij’s ignorance of American television. Dave Meltzer told the story in detail on the latest Wrestling Observer Radio.

“So, the story on the Jay White thing was is that, when Tony was hyping ‘Forbidden door, forbidden door,’ everybody was starting to think, ‘Who from New Japan is coming over?’ because that’s the forbidden door. And actually it’s funny, because I’ve been asked, so I might as well answer it here, ‘Where did that term come from?’

And it was actually a term that Hiroshi Tanahashi came up with to build up his match with Chris Jericho at the Tokyo Dome a couple of years back. And then, people just took it as like, because the relations with New Japan and AEW were not good under Harold Meij. I mean, and I was there when it happened and it was a, you know…

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There are so many people who try to defend New Japan on this. I mean, I know where their mentality was. I was talking to them when this was going on and I knew both sides of the story when this was all going down. The reality was, New Japan figured these were a bunch of wrestlers trying to start a wrestling company who were going to flop badly and they had a relationship with Ring of Honor and they basically blew ‘em off. They hadn’t announced it, but they had a deal with TNT. They’re going to be on TNT. Most likely. It could’ve been Showtime  but it was going to be TNT. So, they were going to probably be on TNT. I can say that in Japan, they don’t know what that means. That’s the problem.

Ring of Honor kind of became obsolete. And I figured that Ring of Honor was going to become obsolete unless they didn’t draw on TNT and got cancelled. Then it would’ve been bad. But, they were going to get a multi-year deal. And I didn’t think they were going to flop. I didn’t think they were going to do the numbers they did. No one in wrestling did. They were only looking for a .20 which they would’ve considered acceptable. I thought that number was, you know, reasonable to expect, especially before we knew NXT was coming against them. We all knew NXT was going to come up against them because that’s just Vince. Vince is very predictable when it comes to that type of stuff. Because of Harold Meij not wanting to do any business with them and wanting to do business with Ring of Honor, just fell apart and became the ‘forbidden door.’ And then, when Harold was out, then it opened up the door for them to do some business and obviously, they’re doing business now.”

Jay White could be just the first NJPW star to show up in AEW. Tony Khan sounds serious about the forbidden door. We’ll see if anyone joins him in the weeks leading up to the Revolution pay-per-view.

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Transcription by Ringside News