wrestling / News

Court Bauer On Having a News Segment On MLW Fightland, Changing Up the Wrestling Format

October 7, 2021 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas

MLW Fightland will have a unique news-oriented piece as its halftime show segment, and MLW President Court Bauer gave an idea of what to expect from it. Bauer spoke with Wrestling Inc for a new interview and discussed the segment, which will fit into Vice’s news-directed format and will feature wrestling journalists discussing the big news in the industry. You can check out the highlights from the interview below:

On the wrestling format getting stale over the last couple of decades: “For 25 years or so now, you’ve had the same format in wrestling. It’s one hour, two hour, three hour version of it, but essentially, all my competitors, including myself, have used the same format. You think about the ’70s and how the evolution of wrestling changed from watching it in that era, and you go back and watch on the WWE network, or Peacock or YouTube, and then you look at how it evolved into the ’80s and how the ’80s model evolved into the ’90s model, that crash TV. And then it just stopped evolving, and you look at wrestling and fans love great wrestling matches.

“They love watching the angles. They love watching all that, but at the same time, they’re always on their phone when they’re watching it and they’re looking at what the latest gossip news is. They want to know. We do research and see what’s trending, what’s interesting. It’s all rooted in accessing and having information and knowing what the latest news is, the latest gossip, everything. You want to get that instantaneously, and wrestling hasn’t really gone there. And promoters, I think, are uncomfortable because you have to control that. You want to control control everything.”

On the MLW Embedded segment tonight: “When we were talking with Vice and spitballing what we could do a little differently and how they lead into such a news narrative direction with their program. I said, well, I’m such a news junkie for wrestling and everything. I think we should go there and just give complete autonomy to the people doing that segment. Let them talk about what they want to talk about. What are the topics? What are the stories they can break, and if it’s about another league, that’s fine. I think it’s interesting, and if more people are going to watch us because of that, I’m not afraid of that

“If someone gets signed, we want to know about it. If some companies for sale, we should know about it. We want to hear the latest from you guys. So having the top journalists in the game talking about, I think, is interesting. I think fans want to see what that is. So kind of like during an NBA game and you go back to the studios in Atlanta on TNT and watch Shaq and Barkley talk about not just the game itself but break down the latest stories and talk about it, that’s what we’re going to be doing here. It’s kind of like our halftime show, and we’ll be talking about the latest stories, or I should say you will be. I have nothing to do with it.”

On the topic of free agency coming up on tonight’s Embedded: “There’s some guys out there that are interesting to us. You hear rumors about different guys, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you guys talking about in the free agency topic on ‘Embedded’ because there’s definitely guys out there you’ve heard a lot of things about where they’re going and then maybe that thing falls apart. Then you’re like, well, where are they going next? You guys are gonna give us the scoop this Thursday and Vice.”