Jonathan Gresham And Baron Black Discuss TERMINUS And What Modern Grappling Means To Them

Jonathan Gresham and Baron Black are looking to bring their own flavor to independent wrestling starting in 2022 with TERMINUS: Modern Age Grappling.

Ahead of the inaugural event on January 16 in Atlanta, GA, Gresham and Black sat down with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp for an in-depth discussion about TERMINUS. One of the topics both men touched upon was the tag of “Modern Age Grappling.” They proceeded to share what exactly that means to each of them.

Baron Black: “For me, the name was really a collaboration between both of us. He gave me his view for the ‘modern age grappling’ tagline and I agreed with that and support it. The TERMINUS name was something I brought to the table to him and he was like, ‘that works and fits with what we’re doing as well.’ From my point of view on modern age grappling, it’s showing wrestling in a different light, a modern light. Like he said, wrestling changes every few years and we want to show what the modern age grappler looks likes, the presentation, and what a show with the modern age grappler will look like.”

Jonathan Gresham: “It derives, in my mind, I have this thought for so long that wrestling being perceived while we’re watching it and suspending our disbelief about it as a sport, it’s been referred to as ‘entertainment,’ that’s fine, but I feel like if you listen to music. Today you want to listen to country, tomorrow is hip hop. I feel like wrestling should be the same. In a perfect world, every company should represent something different. For example, WWE would be entertainment. IMPACT would be like CHIKARA because people die and come back to life. Ring of Honor was like a sport presentation. If we can all come together and be like, ‘this is us, we’ll stay off your toes and you stay off ours,’ and everybody can be their own universe. To me, that would be perfect. That’s not the case. I’m trying to bring that idea to TERMINUS. The name ‘modern age grappling’ derives from the original rules of wrestling mixed in with pure wrestling rules but also a huge influence of mount Everest wrestling, which people know as World of Sport Wrestling. I had the idea to squash all these rulesets together and create something unique and special. They will all find out very soon when matches are announced and the style of matches are announced. That’s how ‘modern age grappling’ came about. it took a very long time to concoct this, maybe since 2021 I’ve been thinking about this.”

Gresham had found a great deal of success in Ring of Honor holding their Pure Championship. He is set to challenge for the ROH Championship at ROH Final Battle against Bandido. ROH will go on a live event hiatus for the first quarter of 2022 with plans to return in April with Super Card of Honor.

You can continue to follow along and watch the development and growth of TERMINUS by checking out the promotion on Twitter, @TERMINUSpro.