MLW’s Court Bauer: Losing RUSH To Ring Of Honor Changed My Approach To The Wrestling Business
Court Bauer was a recent guest on the Keepin It 100 with Konnan podcast, and he told Konnan (via Andrew Thompson of POST Wrestling) that losing RUSH after the Luchador signed with Ring Of Honor led to a change in how he approached the wrestling business.
“Those guys were not under contract. Now our contracts are… so interesting case with RUSH, so the guy was huge, killed it for us in Chicago and I saw this guy had huge potential. I think he did like two or three days for us. Like Miami, Chicago and somewhere else and he worked because we have a show in English every week. We also have a show every week in Spanish on beIN Espanol that’s really well high-rated and primarily our audience is comprised of first, second-generation Mexican-Americans, and so we saw a real big play to make one of our top guys when we were in talks to do a deal, and we got the blessing from Paco Alonso who was alive at the time, and then other parties got involved to try and pull him in a different direction and it was one of those interesting moments where you’re like, we had such a rich package put together in terms of a deal for him that as you seen this in sports, right? Like teams put it all on one guy and it kinda went against how I approached the business. Like I do a wrestling version of Moneyball and find undervalued, undiscovered talent and put them in our system and they thrive and this guy was a stud, just a stud and you had to figure out a way to make this make sense from a financial point of view and I was looking at that deal, I was like, ‘Man, this is gonna be a really risky deal because we’re putting everything behind him.”
“All of our resources and a big chunk of our budget,’ and the deal didn’t happen and that allowed me when that deal didn’t happen to go out there and sign [Jacob] Fatu, Josef Samuel, Richard Holliday, Alex Hammerstone, like two or three other dudes and that filled out my whole roster for years and he went off and he did great things elsewhere, but for me it was like such a valuable lesson, stay [to your] principle, don’t be tempted over this because he was an incredible and is an incredible talent and will be for years to come but, there are a lot of great guys out there. If you know where to look — even right now, no one thinks there’s no great talent out there. I’m about to sign another guy that’s a stud, so it’s like, they’re out there.”
Check out the full episode of Keepin’ It 100 at this link.
Court Bauer was also featured in WrestleZone’s 2020 edition of the “Best For The Business” series, talking about the impact COVID-19 had on the promotion, as well as how they’ve been able to rebound and move forward as a promotion.
Signing deals with DAZN and Fubo Sports, among others, MLW continues to offer fans more ways to watch their content no matter where they live. Asked if all of this work is by design and a way to “future proof” MLW’s library, Bauer says that’s not exactly an easy task but they are actively looking at trends and establishing a stronghold in entertainment’s next step forward in the streaming market.