AEW announcer and Senior Advisor “Good Ole’ J.R.” Jim Ross took to an episode of his “Grilling Jr” podcast to talk about a number of topics, including the new WWE ID program.
Ross said, “Yes, and I think it’s about time. Vince was never very motivated to invest time and money in supporting the indies. It was just — I remember the conversation we had. It was simply, ‘Well Vince, where do you think we got all these other guys?’ We had some college guys as you know, but we had a lot of diversity. You get diversity via selection. It’s just a crazy deal, you want different personalities, you want different body types, you want different ethnicities.”
On how independent talent shouldn’t sign any sort of contract that would prohibit them from wrestling for another company:
“Well, you’re not really eliminating it because if you don’t sign a contract and you got a maybe a letter of agreement or something casual, I can see that being a good recruiting tool because then guys build their confidence, they build their self esteem, they got a WWE deal in the works. They’d be stupid to sign a contract that prohibits them from wrestling for another company. Don’t do that, that don’t make any sense. But having that WWE offer or agreement, that’s good for those guys. It’s good for the talent.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
