Violent J wants more for JCW.
Since launching in 1999, Juggalo Championship Wrestling has attracted a multitude of fans, with early crowd sizes equivalent to that of ECW at the time. Still, Violent J feels that the promotion founded by him and Shaggy 2 Dope doesn’t get enough recognition. During a recent interview with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard, Violent J further explained the success that JCW has reached in terms of national exposure and drawing wrestling legends to its lineup. In doing this, Violent J hopes that JCW gets more noise surrounding it, while also being taken more seriously.
“Maybe it doesn’t sound so big of a deal now in today’s world when there’s all these national companies, but we were doing them when there wasn’t any and when it was next to impossible,” Violent J said. ‘We were a national company, running pay-per-views even before pay-per-views were a thing. Nobody was running pay-per-views; we were running them all the time. It just was happening in the Juggalo world, so people didn’t know it or they didn’t care. I want JCW to get its props, man.
“JCW is the only company I know of that had its world championship title defended twice on [WCW] Nitro. I don’t know of any other wrestling company that ever had their world title defended in WCW. Maybe AWA when they did that show together, but Vampiro defended our belt twice on and it was acknowledged by the commentators. I love that s***. I want people to take JCW serious; I want people to consider it a real promotion. We wear clown paint and we’re wild. That’s just our artistic decision as artists, but it doesn’t mean the whole company is a joke. It doesn’t mean the whole company isn’t real.”
JCW: A Warm Platform For Legends
In addition to its crossover with WCW and large collection of pay-per-views, JCW has also spotlighted a number of legends, such as Kamala, The Great Muta, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, and current AEW World Tag Team Champions The Young Bucks. And according to Violent J, they’ve been well taken care of.
“We’ve had everybody who’s everybody,” Violent J said. ‘We had the Young Bucks versus the World’s Greatest Tag Team when that was the hottest two teams in the world. We had them facing each other. The things we do, a lot of it was just unknown of forever. Like I was telling you about the legends; that stuff means a lot to us. The number of wrestlers who had their last match in JCW. Roddy Piper’s last match ever was JCW. Kamala’s last match ever was in JCW. These are huge honors to us. We’ve done really cool stuff.
“One time, [The Great] Muta came all the way from Japan just to wrestle in JCW. I’m just touched by that. I can’t believe that man would get on a plane and do that for us, you know? Maybe I sound crazy just saying this stuff, but it just doesn’t seem like any other national company in America that’s been around as long as we have and done the stuff we’ve done, the amount of pay-per-views, live streams, tours, sold the tickets we’ve sold and things like that, seems like they would be respected more than we are. But the painted-face and the Juggalo thing just automatically causes so much damage to our credibility. And I don’t really think that’s fair because we’ve proven ourselves over and over.”
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