Freddie Prinze Jr. was inspired by greatness.
During an appearance on the Wrestling with Freddie podcast, host Freddie Prinze Jr. spoke with Matt Cardona about how he was inspired to start his own independent wrestling promotion, crediting Cardona’s run in GCW as the catalyst. Prinze says seeing what Cardona did at GCW made him get the ball rolling for starting his own company, and it’s something that he’s working on funding so he can make that dream come to fruition.
“I didn’t know about like doing this death match with [Nick Gage], it looks like he was in Dante’s Inferno. So to do that and come out on the other end a changed artist, this sort of like, you go through fire to be reborn, dude you’re like the Phoenix, you’re like Jean Grey from the X-Men,” Prinze said. “It’s so sick to see what you’re doing, man.
“I’ll put it to you this way, and you are to credit for this. I called my accountant after watching this GCW and you’re what made me watch GCW, and I said I wanna start an indie wrestling federation in California. And he said, ‘you’re insane, you can’t do that, you’re gonna lose money.’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I wanna have enough for two years.’ He goes, ‘then you have to go get a job.’ So I took a job with Netflix and I did a movie in New York, started putting money away, and I told a couple of my friends who are successful and they were like, ‘Yo, whatever you put in, I’ll match it, and we’ll fail for two years.’ And everyone hates it in that two years, then we’re screwed, whatever. We failed doing something we love. And if not, it’s gonna be awesome. I was like dude I’m in. So I’m literally on that train right now to build up the coin purse, the wrestling coin purse to do it,” Prinze said, “and it’s all because of watching what you did there. And to hear you say I didn’t know if I should do this, and then see where you’re at now, like that doubt that I had is completely freaking gone.”
Prinze previously brought up his desire to start a wrestling promotion on the Ariel Helwani Show, explaining that he pitched it to his accountant and wanted to do it on a smaller level in California. During the same episode, Prinze also detailed his experience as a writer for WWE, including how a pitch to making Jeff Hardy WWE Champion in 2008 led to a falling out with Triple H. Read more about the reaction to Hardy’s title reign at this link.
