Select Answers: John Gaburick, Interim Champs, Lacey Lane, Ashante (Patreon)

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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Hey Sean! I was watching an old clip of Tough Enough from years ago and saw this guy named John Gaburick featured a lot. I was wondering more about him, why he was featured prominently on Tough Enough, if he worked for other organizations, and if he’s still in the world of pro-wrestling today. I feel like I never heard much about him after Tough Enough. Thanks!

John Gaburick was a producer for WWE who was pretty influential. He would move on to TNA Wrestling, and gained some pretty heavy power there, that a lot of people in the company did not feel he did well with. His work there was very heavily criticized, and the company took some major hits with him near the top. He had worked as a liason between WWE and Saudi Arabia as recently as last year.

Backstage reaction to WWE announcing an “interim” champion until Rhea returns? Seems like it would have just been better to vacate, have someone win it and see how they do as champ until she returns.

I haven't really heard anything negative about it. No eye rolling or anything like that. It's a different approach for WWE, and just something new they're trying. I know any time something like this happens, it's met with a lot of jest from fans, but the roster seemed happy about the match.

You reported a while back that Lacey Lane and Ashante Adonis were signed with AEW. Are they still there?

They are, they just aren't prominently featured. Both of them have been featured on Ring of Honor of late. Ashante had wrestled a bunch of dark matches, as well. Yes, both are still with the company.