Joey Janela was a recent guest on Prime Time Wrestling with Sean Mooney and talked AEW, ALL IN, & more. Highlights appear below.
(Transcription Credit: Michael McClead, WrestleZone)
Janela On Lying To Promoters About His Level Of Experience Early On:
I just lied to promoters. I told them I was trained and some promoters would be like, ‘Can you sell ten tickets for us? This is kind of in your area.’ I would go, ‘Yeah.’ I wouldn’t sell the ten tickets, but somehow I still sailed along on that ship.
On Having A Small Stature & His Role In Wrestling Early On:
I weighed even less than 120 pounds [when I started]. I think I was maybe 110 pounds. I went up to maybe 130. Senior year of high school I was wrestling almost every weekend and I was 150 pounds. The promotion I worked for – there were always the names that were brought in. I was never the guy that wrestled the names. I was the guy who wrestled the other ticket sellers and I was one of the good ticket sellers. I could make guys look semi-passable and sometimes I couldn’t, but that would be my spot until I started getting things and then they would make me wrestle the regional guy, who was pretty decent. You could have a decent wrestling match. All that crowd saw all night was garbage wrestling and the guy that just got released from WWE and Greg Valentine wrestling Tom Brandi. That’s what the crowd go, so sometimes I’d fill that slot of guy who could have decent wrestling match. That was the New Jersey carny indies.
On What Got Him Over Despite Being Untrained:
I guess just charisma. I had the basics down and I would do some cool stuff. I was a lot more athletic then than I am now and I could do a lot of the crazy flips. I could do the shooting stars. I could do the springboard moonsaults to the outside into the third row. I kind of blew my load with all that back then because I don’t do it anymore. I guess I’m older now, but I kind of grew out of that. Between that and my charisma, dressing me up sometimes in a monkey costume – I had a monkey gimmick. It was just weird stuff, weird times. Wrestling will never be like that ever again.
On The Importance Of Social Media:
Twitter is really what helped me get my name out there after that roof thing because it gave me a platform for me to express myself and say whatever I wanted to say. A lot of people these days in professional wrestling like to walk on eggshells. The landscape has changed in wrestling. It’s more of a PG product now, the WWE. People have to watch what they say. The climate outside of wrestling, the climate of life, the President uses social media to air himself out. It’s just wild stuff, some of this. Everything has changed due to Twitter, due to Instagram, and who knows? I don’t even know where you can go next in society after this. They always find a way. They always find a new platform. Social media definitely changed the way I marketed myself and got bookings, content, everything. My Spring Break wrestling shows became successes overnight due to Twitter, due to social media. Now those shows are selling out in 4 minutes. Social media is #1. Wrestlers should use it to their fullest.
How Joey Janela’s Spring Break Came To Be:
It was Brett Lauderdale, the owner of GCW, and Giancarlo got offered a slot on a deal during WrestleMania weekend and they thought, ‘How can we make this work?’ My social media at that time was developing a following. They said, ‘Let’s just call it Joey Janela something and have some wild party show at midnight Mania weekend and see how it does.’ We didn’t think it was gonna do that good, but I tell all the young wrestlers that ask me for advice, they say, ‘What can I do to get my name out there?’ I say, ‘Social media.’
Readers may listen to Sean Mooney’s interview with Joey Janela in its entirety below:
