MLW Underground will make its debut tomorrow night on REELZ.
MLW owner Court Bauer spoke with The Ringer in a recent interview, and highlights are below:
Growing MLW’s footprint: “The original MLW’s TV package was really piecemeal in how it was structured. But beIN Sports — even though they had diminished market penetration — they enabled us to grow in a lot of ways because we were getting a rights fee. That helps. If you have exposure and a rights fee, that’s really the engine that runs every major wrestling organization in America, whether it’s WWE, AEW, or us. So to have that and be able to then expand upon it with a Spanish-language feed every week, that allowed us to find a way to tap into a new market that really wasn’t being served.”
The look and feel of MLW Underground: “We are a raw, unvarnished, ultra-realistic product. [Underground] is the fastest, quickest hour in wrestling, and it’s damn good. All of our competitors think having more hours means they’re better. MLW Underground is all killer, no filler, and I think that’s what’s going to make people enjoy it when we come to REELZ with Underground. The other companies are going to keep running the same plays and have their identity be that they’re going to keep signing random wrestlers to make big splashes for one or two weeks, and then they’ll vanish into the witness relocation program. Everyone on the MLW roster has a focus, and we make sure it counts. There’s no politics here, just damn good wrestling.”
The struggle with weight classes in pro wrestling: “When I was in WWE, if you were the cruiserweight champion, that was basically a death knell. You were given a ceiling. Even if you lost the belt, you were now pigeonholed into being a cruiserweight. It’s something a lot of wrestling promoters have struggled with because they never worked in boxing or never worked in MMA, so they don’t have a real understanding for how it works and how it could work. That has helped to differentiate us from our competitors as well; they don’t have real weight classes. They might have a token thing, like in WWE with the 205 Live division. It’s a fad for them, like with the hardcore title. In MLW, it’s the essence of what we are at our core. We have weight classes. I think that feels more here and now than dragging along a brand title and having it be the name-of-your-show championship. You can’t draw fans more out of a fight experience than to do something like that.”
