Jonathan Gresham and Baron Black always aspired to embrace the challenge of operating their own wrestling promotion and now the duo from Atlanta gets to do just that with TERMINUS.
Last month, Black made the announcement that TERMINUS would premiere in Atlanta on January 16, 2022, and the duo already has a growing list of unique names to help build the hype, including the likes of Jay Lethal, Moose, Bandido, Fred Yehi, Lee Moriarty and Daniel Garcia.
Black and Gresham sat down with Dominic DeAngelo of WrestleZone to talk about the birth, development and details behind their buzzworthy promotion that comes with the tagline “Modern Age Grappling.”
“Modern Age Grappling was my idea as far as like borrowing philosophies different psychologies of how pro wrestling should be presented,” Gresham said. “The in-ring storytelling of these different styles. We talk about King’s Road from All Japan, we talk about strong style from New Japan, we talk about the Arc style from Pro Wrestling NOAH that was created out of All Japan, we talk about the Lancaster style, that’s what some people call it, some people call it Mount Everest rules, most people know it as World of Sport. There’s so many different psychologies, even from Lucha Libre. There’s so many different stylistic psychologies that people don’t really recognize and my goal is to bring those styles to the forefront and really like, show people that wrestling is pretty much like mixed martial arts. There’s different disciplines that the combatants have to use.
“Modern Age Grappling is just our way of saying, there’s different styles out here and we want you to pay attention to them, welcome to TERMINUS,” Gresham added. “These are the styles, styles make fights.”
Baron Black and Jonathan Gresham recalled riding in cars together and discussing different aspects about a promotion they just worked a show for and now that the two have the financial means and wrestling maturity to know what it takes to run a promotion, now felt like a good time to pull the trigger. With a name like TERMINUS, many likely think that the name stems from The Walking Dead. In a roundabout way it does, but for Black and Gresham, it was more just a happy coincidence from doing some historical research.
“The name, we got a lot of Walking Dead fans that really paid attention to it,” Gresham said. “Even non-wrestling fans that end up seeing the retweet however end up talking about oh like, ‘People eating people. It’s a trap, don’t go.’ It’s fun because we’re getting those people’s attention as well and to me, that’s part of the reason why because we’re also trying to reach the casual wrestling fan as well and bring them in.
“That was kind of like the collateral positive outcome of the name TERMINUS,” Black said. “TERMINUS just has a historical history with Atlanta. Atlanta used to be called Terminus back in the 1800s. So I wanted something that represents Atlanta in the name, but I didn’t want to call it ‘Atlanta something something.’ You know what I mean? I wanted something unique. And then after doing some history research on Atlanta built as a city I was like, ‘Terminus?’ I was like, ‘Well I think this is why they used it in The Walking Dead and I find out that that was the reason why they put it in The Walking Dead the way that they did.”
Tickets for the TERMINUS debut have already sold out, but you can stay up to date about the latest talent announcements by following Baron Black and Jonathan Gresham on Twitter. You can check out the complete interview with Gresham and Black in the video at the top of this post.
