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There is a New Fever in pro wrestling and it is tearing up the independent scene with eyes on tag team gold come June.
Danny Orion and Josh Shimbashi, known simply as Shimbashi, impressed fans with their fast-paced moves and incredible teamwork during WrestleMania Week in Las Vegas and their rising popularity helped land them their latest shot at a tag team championship.
New Fever will take on 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 going into the match.
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Shimbashi and Danny Orion are a tag team group called New Fever (Provided to Fox News Digital)
“Expectations, for sure, we’re just gonna dog walk the hell out of them,” Orion told Fox News 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 over ‘Mania week and what we’ve been doing.”
Shimbashi said he’s bringing an extra suitcase with him for his half of the belt.
“I’m expecting that bag to be about 20 pounds heavier. I’m going to bring a separate carry-on bag so I can put that new belt into,” he said. “And I think Pandemonium gets the unique opportunity of being the first tag team championship that New Fever is going to hold – first of many, by the way.
“I expect, and you can quote me on this, I expect three tag titles by the end of the year … I already believe that New Fever easily is something special. I think we’re already doing what a lot of tag teams aren’t doing, which is wrestling all over the country, which already puts us in a unique class, and we haven’t been tagging for a full year. I’m not someone to lose momentum. Danny’s not someone to lose momentum. To me, the sky’s the limit from here.”
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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 pro wrestling journeys to get to this point.
Shimbashi explained that he had to pay his own way to get to a pro wrestling school and saved up nearly $2,100 to start training. He met Orion at his first booking. As for Orion, he explained that he broke his leg playing flag football and started to see wrestling videos on his social media. From there, he started to research schools and started to train from there.
The two said they weren’t in a tag team off the top. The two started in two separate groups. Orion tried to convince his group to allow Shimbashi to join them, but kept getting the run around.
Shimbashi and Danny Orion, known as New Fever, compete in the ring. (Provided to Fox News Digital)
“I’m still not over your two friends not letting me in the group because I thought that was crazy,” Shimbashi told Fox News Digital. “We were in two different teams at the time. And Danny and I were both like, let’s merge the teams and become a big team. And everyone, except us, was like, ‘Bad idea, not 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 we both happened to get noticed by the same people and they were like, ‘Oh, they’re both from Texas. Let’s have them show up to these shows.’ And then, it kinda became a running bit for a while. Wherever I was at on a show, Danny was also at and vice versa. And I think they were like, ‘Well, you guys tag, right?’ And we were like, ‘Absolutely, we tag a lot.’ And since then, now we can actually say we’ve tagged.”
It took the duo a hot minute to come up with the New Fever tag team name.
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“I discovered a band on TikTok called South Arcade,” Orion told Fox News Digital. “Someone captioned (a video) being like, ‘Oh, I love when White boys sing. Let’s get White boys to sing like this again.’ And it was actually good and so I did a deep dive on them. They had this retro, like, early 2000s kinda vibe and I just started really vibing with their music.
“I did post one of their song names, like a caption, ‘Danny Orion is the new fever of wrestling,’ or something. And some people were like, ‘Yo, that’s a good moniker.’ I kept that for a bit. Him and I were coming up with tag team names, which were all bad by the way. … Blender Bros was the one.”
Shimbashi said the original plan was to be called the Blender Bros.
“This was our genius idea as a team. We loved saying we put people in the blender, let’s be the Blender Bros. And then we were like, ‘Oh my god, I got it.’ We’ll bring a blender to shows and we’ll make people smoothies and that’ll be our thing,” he said. “We both went, we gotta sit on this, don’t 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 just being like, OK, he was in a group called Culture Shock and I was in a group called Pretty Boy Rock, and our genius idea was Pretty Boy Shock. And after one time, we were like that’s bad, we gotta switch it.
“Then, Danny was like, what about New Fever? And I was like, yeah, that’s better than anything we came up with.”
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New Fever picked up a win over Jordan Saint and Robert Martyr at Pandemonium Pro’s Whatever 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.