We reported that WWE severed ties with DSW, but now more infomormation is coming out as to why. WWE’s decision to sever DSW from their developmental territory program went down last Wednesday with John Laurinaitis and Mike Bucci, among other office staff, going to Atlanta to inform Hamilton and take WWE’s ring and equipment from Hamilton’s building.
The equipment was then sent to Tampa, Florida, where it is expected to be set up at Steve Keirn’s school, with the idea of putting together a developmental territory there. Florida has been earmarked for an eventual developmental site for some time.
The DSW-assigned wrestlers were told that none of them are being released and they will all be relocated. The terminology used was that the experiment failed and WWE wasn’t blaming the boys.
There were a number of factors that soured WWE, most recently Hamilton signing an international TV deal with the Fight Network in Canada without their blessing, but there were other issues, including the feeling that Hamilton was letting Bill DeMott come around after he was fired, undermining DeMott’s replacement Tom Prichard in the process, Hamilton’s failure to book regular house show loops for the boys to work and learn, and an overall dissatisfaction with how DSW was running the developmental end.
