ROH star and current Pure champion Jonathan Gresham recently spoke with Inside the Ropes about a variety of subjects, including how he worked hard to stand out during a competitive time in the industry and why his style fits perfectly with ROH. Highlights are below.
How he tried to stand-out and be different:
“I was like, how can I differentiate myself? And often times, I have to provide it myself and not just think about myself, but think about my peers and think my company. And in my mind, at that time, with the New Japan relationship, and The Young Bucks still being there, stylistically, the company was the same as every other company. So I thought to myself, what help me get to Ring of Honor was differentiate myself, making sure it was clear that Oh, that guy is different. I don’t like it, or I do like it. But whenever you notice that it’s different.”
Calls ROH the purest professional wrestling company right now:
“And so in my mind, wrestling companies should be the same way. If you want comedy, you’re going to go to Company A, if you like, whatever, you go to Company B, if you like, pure professional wrestling, or a sports base, like presentation, then you’re going to come to Ring of Honor.”
How he fully committed to the pure style in ROH:
“So I just started to adopt the pure style, instead of saying technical, I start saying pure because it’s closely associated with Ring of Honor. Nobody else can use the word pure, really, when it comes to a division or the style because it belongs to Ring of Honor. So my goal was just to be the pure wrestler over time. I said, Well, I need a character, and my character, who I am in real life really believes in this. So why does this become my character? And so I started to make my character, someone that was an elitist basically. I just kept pushing professional wrestling as like, the best style of professional wrestling period, is closer to the original way of wrestling anyway. So that was pretty much how it came to be. And it just helped me kind of go into a certain direction that got me here today.”
(H/T and transcribed by WrestleZone)