AJ Gray Aims To Bring His Best Form, Why ‘For The Culture’ Was Important And Not Just A Niche Event
AJ Gray recently spoke with WrestleZone Manager Bill Pritchard ahead of his appearance at Paradigm Pro Wrestling’s Heavy Hitters 2 and GCW Homecoming. Gray has an interesting take on his wrestling personality, noting that while some might think he’s doing something new, it’s really just taking what he’s good at and highlighting that instead of mimicking what’s current.
“If you took someone shaped like 2 Cold Scorpio, but he just beat the shit out of people. Fuck wrestling, just beating people up—that’s me. I just go and beat the shit out of people. A lot of people in wrestling now, they do things off like what they see going on now. They don’t really do things that they do best. They don’t really do what makes them stand out.
“Really my style of wrestling is fuckin’ like, it’s literally like a bunch of like early ’90s shit. I don’t really do anything like super crazy or anything. I just try to go out there and give you the best match possible the only way I can and that’s what I try to bring to every show I go to, the best form of me possible in that ring.”
Earlier this year, GCW was set to host “For The Culture” as part of their Collective branded slate of events but that, like everything else in the wrestling world, was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gray notes that the event helped put a spotlight on some of the problems that African Americans face in professional wrestling, adding that it would have served as a statement to the people that tried to hold them back and it’s disappointing they never got the chance to host the event.
“We were bringing something to the table that was highlighting those fuckin’ problems and we were gonna say, ‘We’re gonna show you why we deserve all our fuckin’ rights and we’re just as good, if not better than every single person that says we’re not.’ We were gonna put that all out there and it fuckin’ sucks that we were like weeks away from it happening and it just couldn’t happen, but it was right there.
While there aren’t any concrete plans for the event right now, Gray says he’d love to have a chance to host a similar event once the wrestling world resumes a regular schedule. Gray said some of the events on the original Collective calendar—For The Culture and Effy’s Big Gay Brunch, to name a few—might be seen as niche events but they almost took on a broader appeal because of how many people were looking forward to the shows.
“When we get the chance to do things again, absolutely. I’d love to, I’d love to have that chance again. Normally you’d look at them like niche events. Like just something for a niche audience but every single person possible was looking forward to these two events cause they were so different. You have never seen something on that big of a scale like that before. That’s why it fuckin’ sucks so much that it didn’t get a chance to happen.”
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