Major League Wrestling star Mance Warner recently spoke to Spencer Love of WCSN to discuss a variety of pro-wrestling related topics. Highlights from the interview are below. (Thanks to Love for the transcription)
On his empty arena match against MJF in MLW:
See, it’s a whole ‘nother ball game right there, because like you said, my favourite thing is to go and do the fights, do the shows, the events. Right now, we ain’t got a lot of that going on, so to go out there in front of what I’m used to as a big ol’ crowd, and there ain’t no crowd out there. You ain’t got the people to pull from to get that energy, so you’ve gotta kinda just go out there and remember that they’re going to be watching this, and they’re rooting for you, and you’ve gotta put on a fight that they’re going to appreciate.
On authenticity in wrestling:
Now, I can’t speak for nobody else. My thing has always been I ain’t going to bulls**t nobody. I ain’t going to lie to nobody. If I get hurt, I’m going to tell people ‘hey, I’m hurt.’ I ain’t going to bulls**t nobody. But, for me, once you lie to the fans, to the people that are spending their money to come see this, you’ve already lost them. At the end of the day, you wouldn’t want to get lied to, I wouldn’t want to get lied to, so why would you want to lie to the fans out there that are spending their money that they’ve gotta work for every day to put a little bread in our pocket? I ain’t going to want to break bread with somebody if they’re lying to me, so I try to always be honest, I try to always call it right down the middle and let people know what’s going on.
Standing out in MLW:
I think, for me – and like you were saying, that roster’s stacked, man. You can look through that entire roster and from the top to the bottom, everybody in there brings something different to the table. It reminds me of old-school ECW. I think the MLW shows, there’s sometimes people that don’t watch it, and then I’ll tell some fan that don’t know about MLW yet, I’ll say ‘hey, go watch this show. I’ll always hear that. I’ll always hear ‘man, it’s one-hour long, from the beginning to the end there’s always something going down.’ There ain’t no bulls**t in it. The backstage promos are always fun and it goes to something else that’s going to happen, and they enjoy it. I never hear anyone watch it and say ‘I hated that damn show.’
The level of trust in deathmatches:
I’ve heard people say this type of stuff before: a lot of guys get more hurt doing a regular, let’s say a regular, straight-up wrestling contest. Let’s say a guy goes for a big dive, he blows his knee out. Now, that motherf***er can’t wrestle for a year. Same thing goes for death matches. I always say, and I’ve pissed people off by saying this before, I think the only way that someone should be dabbling in death match wrestling, (is) they should first be really, really good at just pro wrestling. I don’t want to get in there with some guy that only does death match wrestling, and he can’t take a bump or he can’t give you any type of manoeuvre. Why would I want to have that guy swing a barbed wire at my head? For you to do death match wrestling, you should first know what the f**k you’re doing in professional wrestling.