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Violent J wants fans to know how serious he and JCW are about pro wrestling.
ICP’s Violent J spoke with WrestleZone’s Bill Pritchard about his plans for Juggalo Championship Wrestling. The promotion has been running for two decades, but now ICP is putting more resources into making JCW a full-time endeavor. He says GCW owner Brett Lauderdale has been a great source of inspiration and advice, but he uses several other promotions as an influence to keep growing JCW.
One of those promotions is Billy Corgan’s NWA. Violent J has worked with NWA on-air, including an appearance at NWA 75 managing the Brothers Of Funstruction. Violent J says he’d love to get the attention that NWA gets in the pro wrestling world, noting that JCW isn’t just for Juggalos.
JCW Lunacy features several notable NWA talents, including Kerry Morton and announcer Joe Galli. Violent J says the relationship with Corgan and the NWA really helped, noting how it showed JCW they were doing things on a similar level.
Violent J on NWA’s influence on Lunacy
“It helped a lot because I got to see what he was doing. And no disrespect to them, those guys are organized. Those guys are really serious about what they’re doing,” Violent J explained. “But I was watching that operation and I was like, I can do this. We’ve been doing this. We’ve been doing this, and I can do this. No different than what [Billy’s] doing. Just our flavor and our style. But there’s benefits to playing rock clubs as opposed to a lot of these venues wrestling promotions run.
“Touring is something we’ve been doing for 33 years. We have touring down, so we can tour this company,” he continued. “We have those routes dug out, we have relationships with venues all over the country. Venues always have great sound systems and great lighting and things like that. So our shows feel like that. They feel like a party.”
NWA’s influence on JCW
Violent J credited Kerry Morton as one reason there is a lot of crossover between NWA and JCW, as he’s helped facilitate talent appearances. However, Violent J could see JCW distancing themselves stylistically as they become more established on their own.
“I think a lot of the NWA likenesses also come from working with Kerry Morton. Kerry Morton is a guy that I hired early when we started coming back with JCW full-time. That’s why a lot of the talent is similar,” Violent J explained. “But I think the further we go, the further we get away from that. The further I haven’t been affiliated with NWA, I think more and more we’re getting away from the way they do things.”
Violent J wanted to establish a working relationship between NWA and JCW
Violent J says he feels indebted to Corgan in a way and even offered to position JCW as a developmental platform of sorts for NWA talent. The NWA has several of its own affiliate promotions, including NWA Exodus and NWA JCP Southeast, but it does not look like JCW will join that list.
“When I was watching NWA, I would think to myself, ‘Oh, I would do this if I were them,’ or ‘I would do this differently,’ or ‘I would do more of this,’ things like that. And just appearing there really fired me up. Honestly, it fired me up to want to do this and do this in a big way. I felt a debt of gratitude to Billy Corgan and to NWA for that. So I tried to work something out with them.
“I even offered to, if we could work out some kind of relationship where we would be their NXT or sort of their training ground or something like that. I told Billy, ‘If you want to give guys tryouts and stuff, you can do them on our shows if you want. If you want to work out new gimmicks, you can have the guys come do it on our shows and we could have some sort of affiliation.’ But they weren’t interested, so we’re doing our thing; we’re doing our thing strong.”
Watch our full interview with Insane Clown Posse’s Violent J below:
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