Jimmy Havoc Is Proud of His Run as Champion in PROGRESS, Addresses PROGRESS Wrestling’s Relationship With WWE

– SPORTBible recently interviewed Jimmy Havoc, and he talked about PROGRESS Wrestling’s relationship with WWE. Below are some highlights.

His thoughts on PROGRESS’ upcoming Wembley show: “It’s really cool, it’s a big thing. Obviously, that’s my home promotion, that’s where I built my name, I helped build the company. I’ve done Wembley before with like Impact but it feels like such a much bigger deal now.

Havoc on his match with Will Ospreay moving forward due to schedule conflicts: “At first I was really disappointed. Then when we got to do the match at the Ballroom it felt right because that’s where we did all of our matches and I’m fairly sure we wouldn’t have been able to do an hour at Wembley. So to be able to do around an hour meant a lot…In the end I’m glad me and Paul get to do it again, considering how good the first one was. Yeah it’s the right thing, this is the storyline that made me.”

Jimmy Havoc on the relationship PROGRESS has with WWE: “There’s a lot of slack being given because our ethos is ‘Punk Rock Pro Wrestling’ and there’s lots of people saying ‘how can you be punk rock if you’re working with WWE and doing Wembley?’ but that is the logical conclusion to punk rock isn’t it, you work on an independent label before you get signed up by a major company. But overall the community feel is still there but just in front of more people with more lights and a bigger ring.”

Jimmy Havoc on being proud of his title run: “I look back at my time as champion and I’m very proud of everything I did but at the time the ****ing pressure that was on me, I hated every second of it. I got so nervous before matches because the fans are so hot and because we love performing there so much there’s a lot of pressure. So when I was on last after all these awesome matches I was always thinking, ‘this is going to be shit, I don’t know what I’m going to do’ and I always used to feel sick before my matches. I hated every single match I had, I felt like I wasn’t good enough. Then watching back afterwards I used to think ‘well that was okay, I did the best I could do.’ I might not be the most athletic person or the smoothest technical wrestler but I think I’m good at telling stories. I’m very proud of what I did. Obviously I’d like to be champion again because it’s cool, init. As long as I can have a storyline I think that’s what I’m more interested in, doing matches that people care about. There’s people that are a lot better than me at wrestling and deserve the title more than I do so as long as I can carry on telling stories.”