Pennsylvania’s “The Ultimate Wrestling Experience” owner Sage Strong and Vice president Hollywood’s Finest, Kevin Murphy recently took some time to sit down with PWMania.com. The indy promoters/stars spoke on several subjects from their influences to forming the independent wrestling promotion, marketing the product and more. Here are some highlights:
Who are/were some of your influences?
SAGE: My biggest influence as a child was Hulk Hogan, but as I’ve grown in the wrestling business it’s been more recently the men and women that haven’t seen the big paychecks. The workers in the wrestling industry that don’t see the spotlight, but put the faces over in the wrestling industry. It takes someone to lay down, in order to put someone over and make them a star. If no one laid down no one in the wrestling industry would be successful. Just like in life, in the ring, we are all in this thing together. It takes at least two people to have a match, but to have a great match, it takes two people with their egos checked at the door
Kevin: Ric Flair, Chris Jericho, but to be honest, as I said a moment ago, I really have to say that Sage is my biggest inspiration. If you would have seen Sage, when we were kids, he was the skinny kid that got picked on. He went out and gave it 100% and did this. I actually went with him, when he was trained. He then went out on many tours, getting a ton of experience, and helped train me, to get us ready to do this wrestling thing, together.
You’ve done a great job marketing the UWE, you draw very impressive crowds. Any advice to those drawing 300-500 people to their shows?
SAGE: Promote. A lot. Think outside of the box when and where you promote, money isn’t always going to draw big crowds. No offense meant, but take TNA for example… they have talent and money, but the draw isn’t there on a regular basis to support growth. They’re stagnant.
Kevin: Yep, if you look at our shows, you’ll see that we’ve been drawing pretty respectable crowds since day one. We really work hard to promote our shows.
You can read the complete interview at this link.
