ROH superstar and current Pure champion Jonathan Gresham recently spoke with the Wrestling Perspective Podcast to hype this Friday’s Final Battle pay per view, where the Octopus defends the gold against Dak Draper. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
On his communication with creative and learning to roll with the punches:
So on the indies, I could control my story, like what I say, what I do and if I didn’t wanna take a booking, I didn’t have to but now in Ring of Honor, it’s a different experience, a learning experience for me now in trying to translate what’s in my mind and verbalize it to people so they understand and I’m pretty much just selling my ideas, you know what I mean? Because at this point with Ring of Honor, what’s really cool, I’ve never been to WWE but we don’t have ‘writer writers’ so they don’t just like, I guess, shove stuff in your face and tell you to do this so you kind of have to have your own ideas and hope that it makes sense for what the promoter has going forward and that’s really difficult for me because I don’t always know. Communication with booking isn’t always great, for me anyway. So it’s very difficult to like translate what is in my mind across. At first it was very difficult but now I’m learning to roll with the punches a little bit more and that is the same thing with promos.
Reveals he found out he was winning the Pure championship the day before:
I had found out I was winning it [Pure Championship] I think the day before. I was told on a call. But, I don’t know. Since I got to Ring of Honor, I was always like putting over — whoever would listen, whether it was Todd Sinclair or one of the boys, I would always talk about how like Pure wrestling would differentiate the company from everyone else and just give us something that’s ours and that nobody else could do or nobody else would be doing and I just kept preaching that. Somebody in the office said I spoke it into existence. Not just for myself but just to have a variety show, I don’t know. That’s what wrestling is supposed to be. But no, I didn’t know and I don’t know if it was set up for me, I don’t know. I play with this idea because I’m always negative with myself with things is like I think I was the last resort, the last choice because you gotta think about the names that were in the tournament before. I like to think there was no way I was gonna have it. Just like, COVID kinda happened.
Says he likes the relationship between IMPACT and AEW and hopes ROH gets involved in the future:
That’s really cool man. I was really happy to see that happen because I mean, we’re supposed to be trying to make the fans happy the most, you know? And them doing that, the fans are getting a lot of dream matches hopefully soon. But, as far as Ring of Honor, I’m not sure. I would really like to. I can only just keep my fingers crossed and just hope so man. I don’t know anything that’s happening but I haven’t heard anything. So, I probably won’t until it happens. But, a match that I would want out of that or an impact I would make, I think for the most part just bringing the Ring of Honor style of Pure wrestling to like a big television audience like that, whether it’s with IMPACT or AEW is something I would really enjoy being a part of. So, that’s pretty much the impact. I don’t really have matches or titles or anything but that would be really cool I think.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling
)