AEW‘s Orange Cassidy and Eddie Kingston are headed to Smackdown, just not the one that airs on Friday nights.
On Saturday, August 27th, Cassidy and Kingston will be joined by a roster of independent wrestlers for the ArtsQuest and Lehigh Valley Apparel Creations‘ Steelstacks Smackdown at the Musikfest Cafe in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Known for holding events such as the Greater Lehigh Valley Filmmaker Festival, Christkindlmarkt, and Musikfest, the largest free music festival in the country, Steelstacks is a concert/festival venue that used to be the home plant of Bethlehem Steel, the second-largest steel manufacturer in all of the United States. Steelstacks Smackdown will be the first-ever wrestling show the now 11+ year old venue has ever hosted, but not the first from LVAC.
While it may seem strange to see a clothing company promoting wrestling shows, LVAC has been in the business since 2018. They even have a Cagematch listing (under the Lehigh Valley Athletics Council) to prove it. Since their first show, LVAC Let’s Hang Out! on July 20, 2018, LVAC has produced 16 wrestling shows in various venues in the Greater Lehigh Valley. Their roster, comprised primarily of former wrestlers from the neighboring Reading, PA’s CHIKARA, has included stars such as Daniel Garcia, Kris Statlander, Cheeseburger, Hallowicked, Willow Nightingale, The Butcher and the Blade, Leyla Hirsch, Tony Deppen, Kevin Ku, Rhett Titus, Alex Shelley, Tracy Williams, and Orange Cassidy among others. Several shows have aired on IWTV, with venues including drive-in movie theatres, college campuses, breweries, malls and now an old steel plant for the first-ever SteelStacks Smackdown.
https://twitter.com/the_LVAC/status/1549185234108907521
Committed to making this their biggest show yet, LVAC announced the return of Cassidy to the promotion for the first time in several years. Once a regular with CHIKARA, Cassidy wrestled on several LVAC shows in 2018 and 2019. While Cassidy’s return is exciting for fans of the promotion, the biggest announcement came recently when LVAC tweeted that Eddie Kingston was headed to SteelStacks Smackdown for his LVAC debut. Another former CHIKARA standout, Kingston is one of the most well-respected workers from the independent scene. Now with AEW, Kingston only does a handful of matches on the independents every year, so LVAC definitely pulled out all the stops to bring him in for the show.
Stay tuned to the Last Word on Pro Wrestling for more on this and other stories from around the world of wrestling, as they develop. You can always count on LWOPW to be on top of the major news in the wrestling world as well as to provide you with analysis, previews, videos, interviews, and editorials on the wrestling world. You can catch AEW Dynamite Wednesday nights at 8 PM ET on TBS and AEW Dark: Elevation (Monday nights) and AEW: Dark (Tuesday nights) at 7 PM ET on YouTube. AEW Rampage airs on TNT at 10 PM EST every Friday night. Tickets for SteelStacks Smackdown are on sale now.
