On the latest episode of Talk is Jericho, Court Bauer, the founder of Major League Wrestling, discusses the current state of the promotion, Maxwell Jacob Friedman, his time with WWE and more and more. MLW will make its pay-per-view debut on November 2 at Major League Wrestling Saturday Night SuperFight.
On his exit from WWE:
Bauer: “I was there for two and a half years. I came in in 2005 and left in summer of 2007. I was on the SmackDown team. I was in the midst of their handling of the Chris Benoit thing which, you know, very uncomfortable and they were having the writing team try to be part of the damage control PR crisis team and I’m like ‘This is not the gig and this is not how you really should handle this.’ And at that time, too, I was trying to move on to do something in MMA. It just felt like it was a time to exit with everything going on. Wrestling for me wasn’t fun, there was a heaviness there, it was just a sad time.”
On standing out in the current pro wrestling landscape:
Bauer: “It’s just finding a way, finding our own lane and I really don’t want to try compete in the same sandbox as WWE. You can’t compete in that same sandbox as AEW, so we have to find our own and we just do things a little differently, whether it’s the type of music, the presentation, trying to speak to our fans differently and that’s how we’ve been able to compete. It’s too crowded in those other sandboxes.”
On how MLW is different from the competition:
Bauer: “No writers, no creative team. I was part of a creative team and in my experience, creative teams don’t work. I think it’s very difficult for a lot of reasons, you have the political dynamic, you have just so many people trying to compete with your ideas, you get a hodgepodge of wrestlers, writers and other personnel. It’s like this petri dish of sorts of ideas. When you’re a booker, you work backwards, you create your tent poles, you know what you need to do to draw, you gotta draw money. When you’re booking it’s all about the finishes and it’s all about getting heat. I book things and if it works, great. If it doesn’t, that’s on me, too and I think that’s important. So for us, it’s just trying to showcase different styles, we position MLW as a combat sports league where you can see just about any style. We got an hour, we’re constantly moving at you fast, we don’t do a lot of promos in the ring, it’s just action action and we’re not afraid to get outside and get a little into the weird zone.
The full episode is available below:
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