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There’s a new fever in professional wrestling and it’s tearing up the independent scene with its eyes on tag team gold come June.
Danny Orion and Josh Shimbashi, known simply as Shimbashi, impressed fans with their quick moves and incredible teamwork during WrestleMania Week in Las Vegas, and their growing popularity helped them earn their final shot at a tag team championship.
New Fever will face The Midnight Heat for the Pandemonium Tag Team Championship at Pandemonium: Pro Wrestling’s Dismantling Summer event in Portland, Oregon on June 6. Both Orion and Shimbashi expressed confidence before the match.
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Shimbashi and Danny Orion are a couple group called New Fever (Provided to Pak Gazette Digital)
“Expectations, of course, we are going to exceed,” Orion told Pak Gazette Digital in a recent interview. “That’s number one. I bet they’re excited to be in the ring with New Fever after what we did during ‘Mania week and what we’ve been doing.”
Shimbashi said he will bring an extra suitcase for his half of the belt.
“I expect that bag to be about 20 pounds heavier. I’m going to carry a separate carry-on bag so I can put that new belt on,” he said. “And I think Pandemonium has the unique opportunity to be the first tag team championship that New Fever will hold, the first of many, by the way.
“I hope, and you can quote me on this, I expect three tag team titles by the end of the year… I already think New Fever is easily something special. I think we’re already doing what a lot of tag teams aren’t doing, which is wrestling across the country, which already puts us in a unique class, and we haven’t been tagging for a full year. I’m not one to lose momentum. Danny’s not one to lose momentum. For me, the sky’s the limit here.”
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Orion, already the New Texas Pro World Heavyweight Champion, and Shimbashi have come a long way in their own pro wrestling journeys to get to this point.
Shimbashi explained that he had to pay his own way to go to a professional wrestling school and saved almost $2,100 to start training. He met Orion on his first reservation. As for Orión, he explained that he broke his leg playing flag football and started watching wrestling videos on his social networks. From there, he began researching schools and began training from there.
The two said they were not on a team from the top. The two started in two separate groups. Orion tried to convince his group to let Shimbashi join them, but he kept going around in circles.
Shimbashi and Danny Orion, known as New Fever, compete in the ring. (Provided to Pak Gazette Digital)
“I still haven’t gotten over your two friends not letting me into the group because I thought it was crazy,” Shimbashi told Pak Gazette Digital. “We were on two different teams at the time. And Danny and I said, let’s merge the teams and become one big team. And everyone except us said, ‘Bad idea, no good, I don’t want to do that.’ He left his team and I left my team.
“We were doing singles stuff for a long time and I think the same people noticed both of us and said, ‘Oh, they’re both from Texas. Let’s get them on these shows.’ And then, it became an ongoing thing for a while. Wherever I was on a show, Danny was on it and vice versa. And I think they were like, ‘Well, you tag each other, right?’ And we said, ‘Of course, we label a lot.’ And since then, we can now say that we have tagged it.”
It took the duo a good minute to come up with New Fever’s team name.
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“I discovered a band on TikTok called South Arcade,” Orion told Pak Gazette Digital. “Someone captioned (a video) saying, ‘Oh, I love it when white boys sing. Let’s make white boys sing like that again.’ And it was really good, so I dug into them. They had that retro, like early 2000s vibe, and I started really vibing to their music.
“I posted the name of one of his songs, like a title: ‘Danny Orion is the new wrestling fever’ or something like that. And some people said, ‘That’s a good nickname.’ I kept it for a while. He and I were coming up with team names, which were all bad by the way. … Blender Bros was the one.”
Shimbashi said the original plan was to be called Blender Bros.
“This was our cool idea as a team. We loved saying let’s put people in the blender, let’s be Blender Bros. And then we were like, ‘Oh my God, I got this.’ We’ll bring a blender to shows and make smoothies for people and that’ll be our thing,” he said. “We both said, we have to sit on this, not tell anyone this idea because they’ll steal it. So, we had Blender Bros. I think we had Rail Boys and stuff like that. And we ended up saying, OK, he was in a group called Culture Shock and I was in a group called Pretty Boy Rock, and our cool idea was Pretty Boy Shock. And after one time, we thought that was bad, we had to change it.
“Then Danny said, ‘What about New Fever?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s better than anything we’ve ever come up with.'”
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New Fever earned a victory over Jordan Saint and Robert Martyr at Pandemonium Pro’s Which Forever in Las Vegas. The team has since performed for ACTION Wrestling, PrideStyle Pro, Absolute Intense Wrestling and Pro Wrestling Junkie as they prepare for Dismantling Summer.
