Brett Lauderdale Looks Back At GCW’s First Hammerstein Show, Dealing With Athletic Commissions

Brett Lauderdale recently looked back at hosting the first GCW Hammerstein Ballroom show in 2022. The show took place in January of 2022 at the famed New York City arena, and Lauderdale spoke with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp about the reception to the show, dealing with the New York State Athletic Commission and more. You can check out some highlights below:

On the first GCW show at Hammerstein: “I learned that the bigger the show, the more people that are in attendance and the more people that are watching equals more opinions and everybody has an opinion on how it should be done and how it should have been done and that’s all cool. That was obviously a bigger scope than anything we’d ever done before. So in some ways it was overwhelming. You have so many people saying, ‘Wow, that was the greatest show I’d ever seen,’ and then there’s also a lot of people who said, ‘That was the worst show I’ve ever seen.’ So, you have to try to find and keep that balance and remember ultimately who you are at the end of the day. But of course I learned some things along the way, I learned the value of being GCW in the first place and that we need to remember that GCW is who people want to see and that’s what we have to give them, if that makes sense.”

On dealing with the New York State Athletic Commission: “The New York State Athletic Commission is very strict and relentless and unforgiving. So, even while a show is going on, they have a representative at the event at all times and he’s not just sitting somewhere up in the balcony. He’s following us around telling us every little thing that he thinks is going wrong. If it was anybody else, you could tell them to back up, but you can’t really tell that to the New York State Athletic Commission. So, that’s always a little extra headache for lack of a better term. But so there are those challenges. You can’t do all the things in New York that you might do in other places. But also the Hammerstein Ballroom is not Harpo’s in Detroit, it’s not Headliner’s in Louisville, it’s not the Showboat in Atlantic City, it’s a little different. Aside from being insanely expensive they run their ship a certain way and you kind of have to fall within the parameters and operate a certain way. It’s a real world-class facility where you can’t just go and do whatever you want, if that makes sense. So, those are among the challenges.”

On if wrestling could benefit from more regulation: “Well, it’s hard to say. I think some regulation could be beneficial, but I think at this point, we’re probably too far gone. Once you unregulate, it’s hard to go back. Are you gonna go back and start regulating in all the states that are now unregulated? It’s so hard. Indie wrestling, at the end of the day, is not on the radar for most states, including the ones that do have a commission. We’re spending all this time for what? A couple hundred dollars at the end of the day. A lot of this exists just because it always existed and it hasn’t been abolished yet. So I don’t know. Could wrestling or indie wrestling benefit maybe if there was an actual intelligent way to regulate it. Probably, there’s probably people doing this that shouldn’t be doing it. Probably people promoting events that shouldn’t be promoting events, but I guess it’s hard to figure out. Even if you had regulation, there’d still be people doing it that shouldn’t be doing it and there’s still be promoting events that shouldn’t be promoting events. So I don’t know, I guess you’d have to figure that out. But I think at this point, we’re so far past that. I don’t know how you would go back.”