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There’s a new fever in professional wrestling and it’s tearing up the independent scene with eyes set on tag team gold this June.
Danny Orion and Josh Shimbashi, known simply as Shimbashi, impressed fans with their fast moves and incredible teamwork during WrestleMania Week in Las Vegas and their growing popularity helped them land their last 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 form a tag team group called New Fever (Provided to PK Press Club Digital)
“Expectations, for sure, we’re just going to get rid of them,” Orion told PK Press Club Digital in a recent interview. “That’s No. 1. I bet they’re excited to be in the ring with New Fever after what we did during ‘Mania week and what we did.”
Shimbashi said he brought an extra suitcase with him for his half of the belt.
“I expect this bag to weigh about 20 pounds more. I’m going to bring a separate carry-on bag so I can put this new belt in it,” he said. “And I think Pandemonium has the unique opportunity to be the first tag team championship that New Fever will host – the first of many, in fact.
“I expect, and you can quote me on this, I expect three tag team titles by the end of the year…I already believe New Fever is easily something special. I think we’re already doing what a lot of teams don’t do, which is wrestling all over the country, which already puts us in a unique class, and we haven’t tagged in a full year. I’m not someone who loses momentum. Danny is not someone who loses momentum. For me, there are no limits.”
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Orion, who is already the New Texas Pro World Heavyweight Champion, and Shimbashi have come a long way in their own professional wrestling journeys to get to this point.
Shimbashi explained that he had to pay his own way to get into a professional wrestling school and saved nearly $2,100 to start training. He met Orion during his first booking. As for Orion, he said he broke his leg playing flag football and started seeing wrestling videos on his social media. From there, he started researching schools and training from there.
Both said they weren’t part of a team. The two started in two separate groups. Orion tried to convince his group to allow Shimbashi to join them, but continued to move.
Shimbashi and Danny Orion, known as New Fever, face off in the ring. (Provided to PK Press Club Digital)
“I’m still not over your two friends not letting me in the group because I thought it was crazy,” Shimbashi told PK Press Club Digital. “We were on two different teams at the time. And Danny and I were both saying, let’s merge the teams and become one big team. And everyone except us was saying, ‘Bad idea, not good, I don’t want to do that.’ He left his team and I left my team.
“We did singles stuff for a long time and I think we both got noticed by the same people and they were like, ‘Oh, they’re both from Texas. Let’s get them to come to these shows.’ And then it became a bit of a foot race for a while. Wherever I was on a show, Danny was also there and vice versa. And I think they were like, “Well, you guys, right? And we were like, “Absolutely, we tag a lot. “And since then, we can now say that we have scored.”
It took the duo a good minute to come up with the team name New Fever.
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“I discovered a group on TikTok called South Arcade,” Orion told PK Press Club 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 and so I delved deeper into them. They had this retro, like early 2000s vibe and I just started to really vibe with their music.
“I posted the name of one of their songs, like a caption, ‘Danny Orion is the new wrestling fever,’ or something like that. And some people were like, ‘Yo, that’s a good nickname.’ I kept that for a bit. He and I were coming up with team names, all of which were bad by the way. … Blender Bros was the one. “
Shimbashi said the initial plan was to be called Blender Bros.
“It was our genius idea as a team. We loved saying we’re putting people in the blender, let’s be the Blender Bros. And then we were like, ‘Oh my God, I get it.’ We’ll bring a blender to the shows and we’ll make smoothies for people and that’ll be our thing,” he said. “We both went, 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 being like, OK, he was in a band called Culture Shock and I was in a band called Pretty Boy Rock, and our great idea was Pretty Boy Shock. And after one time we were like, this is bad, we need to change.
“Then Danny said to me, what about New Fever? And I was like, yeah, it’s better than anything we came up with.”
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New Fever picked up a victory over Jordan Saint and Robert Martyr at Pandemonium Pro’s Any 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.
