Booker T and Brad Gilmore want to give tomorrow’s stars the best chance to succeed with Reality Of Wrestling.
WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard spoke with Reality Of Wrestling’s Booker T and Brad Gilmore ahead of the promotion’s ‘The Next Chapter’ event. The show will see appearances from NXT’s Charlie Dempsey and Axiom and the top names from Reality Of Wrestling in action.
Booker said he sees Saturday’s event as a new beginning for the promotion. He wants ROW to offer a unique product that fans haven’t seen at this level before.
“We’re going to try and bring something different to our show on a monthly basis and try to make it like an event, a show, every month, where people can tune in and go, ‘Wow, this is something a little bit different than I’ve watched before’ from an independent perspective. Because we’re not an independent wrestling company,” Booker noted. “We’re a small television company and we’re trying to produce the best we possibly can.
“We look at ourselves as the Triple-A of professional wrestling,” he added, “but we want to be the best Triple-A we can at producing the best stars for tomorrow. So for me, it’s about who’s going to break out tonight and show me something. As Vince McMahon would say, ‘Who’s going to reach for that brass ring?’”
The Next Chapter
Brad Gilmore has been with Reality Of Wrestling for 11 years as of November, and he’s seen how much it’s changed in that time.
“When I started with the company, we were at a recreational facility, you could see basketball goals in the background that we would try to cover up as best we could. To go from that and fast-forward to a decade-plus later and have our own facility that is built in the same way that the NXT Performance Center would be built with rings and equipment and promo classes and training referees, training commentators, training announcers,” Gilmore explained. “Having the LED screens set up just for television is incredible for me to see.”
Gilmore often says there are a lot of great wrestling schools and promotions that you can train at and work for, but none of them offer what Reality Of Wrestling does.
“You wonder why people like Roxanne Perez have flourished in NXT? Well, it’s because when she went there, it wasn’t anything new to her. She had been there before because she had the reps at Reality Of Wrestling. She knew what the television time was, she knew how to work a hard cam,” G she knew what she needed to do as far as a promo goes in front of a live house. None of that was new to her. So I’m excited for the new chapter, this Next Chapter, to have more stars like that in this environment.”
Stay tuned for our full interview with Booker T and Brad Gilmore this week on WrestleZone!
ROW’s The Next Chapter takes place at the ROW Arena, 9300 Emmet F Lowery Expy, #50 in Texas City, Texas. More event details, including ticket information, can be found here.
