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Garden State Pro Wrestling’s Bry Ye Describes The Process Of Launching The Company, Discusses Their Goals

By Colin Tessier

Josh Alexander. Taya Valkyrie. Konosuke Takeshita. Davey Richards. These are just a few of the noteworthy names who will compete at Welcome To Eden, the debut event of Garden State Pro Wrestling.

GSPW will launch with this first show in Newark, New Jersey, on July 23. In a new interview with WrestleZone, Bry Ye, the co-founder and co-owner of the company, discussed the process of getting it up and running. He noted that it all came together fairly quickly, as GSPW has only been a “thing” since March. Ye went on to describe how the idea of starting the promotion started as a joke, but he and his partner wanted to get into the business somehow.

“The way this all started, it was right before ‘Mania this year,” said Ye. “This has only been a thing since late March of this year, and we just made everything come true as quick as we could. I wanted to start a little bit earlier, I wanted to have a show in June actually, but it just didn’t line up in place, and I think this was the perfect time, the week before SummerSlam, to get all this stuff going on. So it literally was just two friends and we’ve known each other going on a year. We got in connection because of wrestling, and I don’t know, it started off as Jones, ‘hee-hee, ha-ha,’ abs we both knew that we kinda wanted to get into the business somehow.

“We didn’t know it would be in this magnitude, but yeah, it just kind of all fell into place. At first we wanted to do one tiny show, and then we kept getting, we reached out to a lot of people, we expected a ton of no’s, a lot of ‘Who are You’s’, or, ‘No thanks, but wait til’, you know. But we got Taya and Josh, and from then on, as soon as we announced those two, we kept getting yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and it kind of just blew up from there. We definitely have a little bit of buzz going into this first show, and it’s been crazy. The process has been very new, and I’m thankful that I have other promoters that have kind of helped me and given me advice, and it’s just been a wild and crazy experience.”

Landing Alexander and Valkyrie was a huge vote of confidence for the new company, as the two renowned stars were on the list of names Ye and his partner wanted in regards to the main events for the debut show.

“So we went in, and we said, ‘Okay, who are the people that we want to main event? Who is like our absolute to-get list?’ Obviously we couldn’t get all of those names,” said Ye. “We didn’t actually even expect to hear back from any of them, let alone two just for this show with Josh Alexander and Taya Valkyrie. It was a huge vote of confidence because we didn’t even expect to get one answer. So it worked out tremendously.”

GSPW is already taking off, as the company has built a star-studded card for its first show. When asked about his background, Ye explained that he’s still in college, but he and his partner successfully got the funding for the event, so everything else fell into place.

“I mean it all came down to money,” said Ye. “Could we get the funding? Could we get a budget together, and we did. Not only do we just have people that we know that have invested some money, we have some pretty good sponsors. We put a lot of our own money into it. Our background, I’m still going to college for business, and my partner is not in college. I don’t think he graduated college at all, and we both just worked normal jobs, and I guess it just kind of happened, and the money fell into place, and we went with it.”

The independent wrestling world is very crowded these days, and while each company aims to stand out, it can be difficult to emerge from the pack as a genuinely distinct entity. Ye stated that GSPW aims to build its own identity by featuring the Americanized Puroresu style. Ultimately, Ye noted that the company will aim to be a bridge to the puro and Joshi style.

“We do want to eventually develop our own kind of unique, not only style, because you can see, if you look at these cards, this card and the next card, we have a lot of puro influence,” said Ye. “We even have Miyu Yamashita on this card, we have Konosuke Takeshita. We don’t have a lot of the normal, I don’t wanna say just straight-up flippy guys, but a lot of guys that do a lot more acrobatic stuff, and we do have a few guys who normally do that, but at the same time, we have a lot of striking-based or technical-based talent, and that’s kind of what the independent scene is kind of lacking is some strong independent company that mainly focuses on kind of that Americanized puro, in a sense.

“Obviously our goal is to eventually just completely mix it with independent wrestling today, the landscape, as well as kind of be a bridge to puro and joshi wrestling. That’s one of our main goals.”

The full card for GSPW Welcome To Eden is as follows:

  • Josh Alexander vs. Konosuke Takeshita
  • Taya Valkyrie vs. Trish Adora
  • Janai Kai vs. Billie Starkz vs. Miyu Yamashita
  • Dark Sheik and Jai Vidal vs. Baliyan Akki and Heather Monroe
  • Young Dumb N’ Broke (Jordan Oliver, Griffin McCoy, and Charlie Tiger) vs. Team H20 (Marcus Mathers, Austin Luke, and Reid Walker)
  • Garden State Openweight Championship Tournament: Alan Angels vs. Kevin Blackwood
  • Garden State Openweight Championship Tournament: Effy vs. Bryan Keith
  • Garden State Openweight Championship Tournament: Davey Richards vs. Robert Martyr
  • Garden State Openweight Championship Tournament: Calvin Tankman vs. Titus Alexander

GSPW Welcome To Eden will air on FITE on July 23.

RELATED: Jungle Kyona And VENY Announced For Garden State Pro Wrestling Dynasty Clash

Colin Tessier
Colin Tessier

Colin Tessier is a lifelong fan of all things Marvel and DC, and he has used this passion to write about them for several years. Likewise, having been a fan of wrestling since he was a kid, he also covers professional wrestling. You can find him on Twitter at @ct_2110.

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