AWE at the Waynesboro Y Friday night
The Superstars of Awesome Wrestling Entertainment will make a special guest appearance at the Waynesboro YMCA on Friday night to take part in the Annual Halloween Festival and Friday Night Basketball.
Short Sleeve Sampson, Alex Silva, Jamin Olivencia and a surprise guest or two will be on hand at the Y beginning at 8 p.m. The wrestlers are in town for a live, nationally-televised pay-per-view extravaganza, the AWE Night of Legends, at Augusta Expo on Saturday night.
The wrestlers will be available for autographs and photos at the Y Friday night.
AWE has donated four tickets to Night of Legends to the Annual Halloween Festival raffle. Short Sleeve Sampson will present the tickets to the winner of the raffle Friday night.
For more information on the AWE Night of Legends show, go online to www.AWEonPPV.com.
Duggan ready to defend good ol’ USA
Now, more than ever, Americans desperately need flag-waving, 2×4-wielding “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan to lead their patriotic charge against foreign enemies of this country.
Duggan will go to war once again on Oct. 15, confronting the hated Arab-American oil magnate Mohammad Akbar, on the AWE Wrestling: Night Of The Legends pay-per-view extravaganza, live from Augusta Expo in Fishersville, Va.
Former WWE and WCW World Heavyweight Champion Kevin Nash, along with his mystery tag-team partner, takes on the former three-time NWA Tag Team Champions, The Rock-n-Roll Express, Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson, in the featured match of the evening. Nash and Morton make the Hatfield and the McCoy feud look tame by comparison. The decade-old skirmish promises to be settled once and for all in their Oct. 15 grudge match, in front of a live national television/Internet audience and a packed live house in Virginia.
After 32 years in professional wrestling, “Hacksaw” Jim hasn’t slowed down a step. His quest is to protect freedom in the wrestling ring. “For the past 25 years,” Duggan said, “I’ve proudly carried the American flag into the ring. I’ve done that in 20 different countries around the world. It’s an honor and a privilege to represent our great country, especially now with so many men and women protecting us around the world. I have never tired of people chanting USA as I go into the ring.
“I fight a lot of guys like Akbar who want to make a name for themselves by fighting me. They may be younger, faster and stronger, but, you can’t measure the heart. When I come into the ring with everybody chanting, ‘USA,’ I can’t be beat, especially by somebody like this who is anti-American.”
The Awesome Wrestling Entertainment extravaganza will be available for live viewing at 9 PM/ET – 6 PM/PT on both cable and satellite pay-per-view via iN Demand, DIRECTV, AT & T and Verizon in the United States, as well as Bell TV in Canada, for a suggested retail price of only $24.95. The broadcast will also be available live on an Internet pay-per-view basis at www.AWEonPPV.com and www.GFL.TV.
Legendary warrior Terry Funk faces his protégé, former ECW superstar Tommy Dreamer, to determine who the true King of Hardcore wrestling is in 2011. A two-time ECW and NWA heavyweight champion, Funk is a Hall of Famer in several organizations who has mentored Dreamer for many years. The tough Texan isn’t quite ready to pass the “hardcore” baton just yet. Despite looking up to Funk as an extreme combat fighting icon, Dreamer, is a 14-time WWF/WWE Hardcore Champion and two-time ECW world title-holder, on a mission to send Funk into permanent retirement.
Other wrestling icons among the 30 all-stars being showcased at the AWE Legends event include Diamond Dallas Page (“DDP”), Fit Finlay, Amy “Lita” Dumas, Perry Saturn, and many more.
Perry Saturn returns to action after nine years on the sidelines, marking the most significant comeback in wrestling history, versus nasty enforcer CW Anderson.
Also scheduled to be in action are former WWE and WCW title-holder Fit Finlay, who accepted the challenge to fight 21-year-old rising-star and the ultra-promising AWE World Heavyweight prospect, “Loose Cannon” Alex Silva. “Nature Boy” Buddy Landel will lend his experience in Silva’s corner.
Former three-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion Diamond Dallas Page (“DDP”), Amy “Lita” Dumas, former World Tag Team Champion and “Four Horsemen” member, Tully Blanchard with Baby Doll, Midnight Express, Ivan Koloff, Tommy “Wildfire” Rich and Sonjay Dutt squares-off against Jamin Olivencia on the action-packed Awesome Wrestling Entertainment card.
All wrestlers and matches are subject to change.
Ringside tickets are already sold-out but $20.00 general admission tickets are available to purchase at The Augusta Expo (540.337.2552), Crossroads Music in Staunton (540.885.3612 and Waynesboro (540.943.3613), or order online at www.awesomewrestlingentertainment.com.
Go online to www.awesomewrestlingentertainment.com for additional show information and to sign-up to watch the event on the Internet. Contact your pay-per-view provider to order AWE Wrestling: Night Of The Legends.
Alex Silva: I’m your man, ‘Big Sexy’
If you’re Alex Silva, the world is your oyster, the AWE your stage.
With all the talk about Silva being a future world-title contender, Silva is thinking to himself, Why wait? The future might as well be now.
“I should be the tag-team partner. I should be in the main event,” said Silva, joining the list of AWE Superstars offering services to Kevin Nash, who is in need of a partner for his main-event tag-team match at the Oct. 15 AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view.
Nash has still not made a final call on who he will choose to be his partner. Early speculation focused on former tag-team partner Diamond Dallas Page, who has both hinted that he will have Nash’s back if asked and that he still considers himself “retired” from active competition.
Several AWE Superstars have been in touch with Nash to offer themselves as his main-event partner, according to reports.
Anderson: The showstopper
The buzz around C.W. Anderson’s match at the AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view is about his opponent that night, Perry Saturn.
Which is understandable, considering that Saturn is returning to the ring at Night of the Legends after a nine-year absence.
“The Enforcer” doesn’t mind that we’re all talking about Saturn going into Night of the Legends. He knows you’ll be talking about how Anderson stole the show going out.
“Every time this Anderson is on pay-per-view, he’s the match of the night, he’s the match everyone talks about. Come Oct. 15, whoever this Anderson steps in the ring against, watch me steal the show and take it to the extreme,” Anderson said.
Finlay: Steppingstone?
Alex Silva is being talked about as a future AWE World Heavyweight Champion.
The “Loose Cannon” first has to cross the formidable hurdle that is Fit Finlay, who doesn’t so much like the idea that he’s a bump in the road for Mr. Silva at the Oct. 15 AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view.
“You may think I’m a steppingstone. I hope you keep thinking I’m a steppingstone. Sunshine, I’m never a steppingstone. And you will find out that I am the best wrestler in the world, and that I’m the roughest, toughest, meanest SOB out there,” Finlay said.
Short Sleeve: Wrestling, and proud of it
Short Sleeve Sampson has heard the pleadings from wrestling fans.
We want wrestling. Please, bring back wrestling. Where has wrestling gone?
“You know what – in AWE, we’ve heard your cries, we’ve heard your requests, we’ve read your petitions,” said Sampson, who has wrestled all over the world in companies big and small, and is proud to call Awesome Wrestling Entertainment “home.”
“No more is there going to be somebody talking on a microphone for 20 minutes with no wrestling. No more is it going to be that you can’t see a match start and see it all the way to the finish with wrestling. No more are you going to be sitting there saying, Where’s the wrestling With Awesome Wrestling Entertainment, we are wrestling, and proud of it,” Sampson said.
Dutt: Don’t miss Night of Legends
Not just Sonjay Dutt. Not just Kevin Nash. Not just DDP.
“Everybody is going to be there. Everybody who is anybody is going to be on pay-per-view,” said Dutt, who will face Jamin Olivencia at the Oct. 15 AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view.
Rock-n-Roll Express: One more time?
Ricky Morton has seen it before. Kevin Nash comes in, immediately becomes the main-event guy and sucks all the air out of the company.
“Kevin Nash, you know the history between me and you. And what is all that about? You coming in someplace, invading it, taking all the money, shutting the place down and running off to somewhere else,” said Morton, whose long-running beef with Nash dates back to their days in WCW.
From Morton’s perspective, his tenure in WCW came to an end because of Nash and his New World Order faction taking over the top spot from WCW long-timers like The Rock-n-Roll Express.
That’s what he and Robert Gibson are fighting for at the AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view on Oct. 15.
“You see, buddy, right here, we stand for the AWE. And one thing I’m not going to let you do is do it to me one more time,” Morton said.
Funk: One last lesson from the teacher
Terry Funk even catches himself asking the question.
“Do you think that you could honestly go back into the ring again?” said Funk, who will face Tommy Dreamer at the AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view on Oct. 15.
They say you’re as old as you feel, “and I feel about 105 right now,” Funk said.
“But, dadgummit, I thought about it, and you’re as old as you feel, that’s for sure, but they say that the older you get, the meaner you get, and I’m getting pretty dadgum mean,” Funk said.
Funk asked for the match with Dreamer, a long-time student of Funk, after going down his options on the AWE roster.
“I’d love to step back into the ring. Maybe not with Diamond Dallas Page. Maybe not with Kevin Nash. Those boys are pretty big boys. Maybe not ‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan. I need somebody that’s pretty crappy to get in the ring with. I was kinda thinking that would be Tommy Dreamer. I knew him when he was sweeping out the dressing rooms in ECW years ago. I’d love to get in the ring with a guy about the caliber of that Tommy Dreamer. I’m thinking I can still whip ol’ Tommy,” Funk said.
Jamin: Call me, Kevin Nash
OK, it’s a bit of a stretch, but …
“The biggest player in the game will be there,” said Jamin Olivencia, appearing to get off the phone with Kevin Nash.
Nash, of course, is looking for a partner for the main event of the AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view on Oct. 15.
Right now, the identity of the partner who will team with Nash against The Rock-n-Roll Express is a mystery.
Mystery solved?
More on the AWE Night of Legends pay-per-view at www.AwesomeWrestlingEntertainment.com.
AWE announces card for Night of Legends PPV
A main event featuring Kevin Nash and The Rock-n-Roll Express and an opener pitting Terry Funk and Tommy Dreamer in a one-on-one matchup for the first time ever will highlight the Awesome Wrestling Entertainment Night of Legends pay-per-view.
The Oct. 15 show will be broadcast on InDemand, DirecTV, AT&T, Verizon and Bell TV beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. Pacific. It will also be broadcast on Internet pay-per-view at GFL.tv and AWEonPPV.com.
In the main event, Kevin Nash and a mystery partner will take on The Rock-n-Roll Express – Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson. The matchup between Nash and Morton has been anticipated for several years. Morton has given several shoot interviews, the first dating back 10 years, trying to pick a fight with the 7’1″, 300-pounder over perceived slights from their WCW days.
The match featuringTommy Dreamer and Terry Funk will pit student against teacher. The Dreamer-Funk matchup will be their first-ever one-on-one matchup. The two had been booked for a match in ECW back in the late 1990s, but the match never happened.
Also on the card
- Perry Saturn vs. C.W. Anderson. Saturn returns to the ring after a nine-year absence.
- “Hacksaw”Jim Duggan vs. Mohammad Akbar. Duggan, Old Glory and his trusty 2×4 in tow, looks to silence Akbar, a young heel on the rise.
- Fit Finlay vs. Alex Silva with Buddy Landel. The WCW and WWE veteran looks to teach Silva, a 20-year-old being talked about as a future AWE champion, a few lessons as he works his way up the ladder.
- Jamin Olivencia vs. Sonjay Dutt. The two have had a running rivalry in AWE, with each scoring controversial pinfalls over the other in recent weeks.
More information on theAWE Night of Legends pay-per-view, including a full list of legends appearing for pre-event autograph signings and dark matches, go to www.AwesomeWrestlingEntertainment.com.
AWE: Local business on the verge of hitting it big
It’s thisclose to being another great example of the Great American Success Story.
The Downtown Waynesboro-based Awesome Wrestling Entertainment will make its debut on television on Saturday, Oct. 15, with a live pay-per-view wrestling event that will be broadcast by InDemand, DirecTV, AGTV and Bell TV in Canada to more than 122 million households in North America.
The live TV event is AWE’s attempt to join the heavyweights of pro wrestling like WWE and TNA Impact.
There is a neat human-interest story behind the scenes with the company. Awesome Wrestling Entertainment is based in a small town in Virginia – Waynesboro, Va., population 21,500, far away from the nation’s biggest media markets. And the company’s CEO is a man named Marvin Ward, 37, a former professional wrestler who had to retire in 1997 after suffering a career-ending shoulder injury and in 1999 opened, with his wife, Stacie, a small wrestling-promotion business out of his home.
Ward has said he now has a better appreciation for the term “overnight success.” After 12 years of promoting house shows throughout Virginia and up and down the East Coast, AWE exploded on the scene this summer with a storyline revolving around a decade-old Internet feud between “Big Sexy” Kevin Nash and Ricky Morton of The Rock-n-Roll Express.
Without TV or any house shows in the summer season to back it up, the back-and-forth between Nash and Morton that played out on the Internet and on AWE’s Facebook page caught fire. The company now boasts more than 100,000 Facebook fans, a number that has caught the attention of pay-per-view giant InDemand, which along with DirecTV, AGTV and Bell TV in Canada will be broadcasting AWE’s Night of the Legends on Oct. 15 on live pay-per-view television.
It’s almost hard for Ward to process how quickly things have happened – after years and years and years of banging his head against a wall.
“We knew from the beginning that unless you have millions of dollars, or knew key people in the entertainment industry, then the odds were against us a million to one. But that did not deter us. I am a firm believer that if you have a dream, and you believe in it, then anything is possible,” Ward said.
Even with that as a given, it’s been far from easy. Ward for years promoted shows at high-school gyms and National Guard armories, sometimes making money, “and at times losing money because we would spend more on national-brand talent and advertising to make sure we had large crowds to get attention.”
The losses added up, and Ward and his wife, Stacie, decided to sell their house and moved with their two daughters, Brittany and Hannah, with his parents.
“Every day, we had family and friends tell us we were crazy to continue to fight for this dream,” Ward said.
And now the family is so close to the big time that they can almost taste it. In four short weeks, Ward will join an elite group of wrestling promoters who can put on their resume that they have produced a live broadcast pay-per-view event.
There’s a lot of work to be done between now and then. AWE has not produced a single TV show to date, and it now needs to build up the infrastructure necessary to broadcast live TV throughout North America and a worldwide Internet feed.
Ward and the AWE team have put together an impressive production operation to add to the roster of wrestlers that includes former WWE and WCW stars Kevin Nash, Diamond Dallas Page, Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Terry Funk and homegrown talents Jamin Olivencia, Alex Silva and Sonjay Dutt.
Friends are trying to remind Ward as the days count down toward Oct. 15 that he needs to take time out every so often to enjoy the scenery.
“This is the first time this has ever happened, a company with no prior TV experience and no background in pay-per-view events being given an opportunity like this to go on live TV,” Ward said. “Entertainment executives are saying this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that our company is being given, and that we have one chance to finally make it and live the American dream.”
AWE online: www.AwesomeWrestlingEntertainment.com
Awesome Wrestling Entertainment announces first live pay-per-view TV event
Awesome Wrestling Entertainment, a new professional wrestling entertainment company based in Waynesboro, will debut its first pay-per-view TV event on Saturday, Oct. 15, live from Augusta Expo in Fishersville.
AWE Night of the Legends will be broadcast into 120 million households in the United States and Canada via InDemand, Dish TV, DirecTV, AGTV and worldwide through AWEOnDemand.com.
The event will feature such world-renowned wrestling celebrities as Kevin Nash, “Diamond” Dallas Page, Terry Funk, Tommy Dreamer, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, The Rock-n-Roll Express, David Finlay and Tammy Sytch. More than 30 legendary grapplers will gather to renew historic rivalries for enthusiasts from around the world.
“We are very excited that we have this opportunity to introduce our company and AWE brand to fans around the world,” AWE founder Marvin Ward said. “We are proving there is a mass following for our company and a huge demand for our product and brand of wrestling.”
The demand for the AWE product is evident in the presence that Awesome Wrestling Entertainment has on Facebook. The AWE Facebook page has grown to more than 100,000 fans in a short period of time and a steady growth daily of new followers.
“The support generated for AWE from fans around the world, without a major television outlet and weekly TV series to promote the product, is unheard off in this industry,” said Chris Graham, the director of marketing for Awesome Wrestling Entertainment.
Fans from 24 states and three foreign countries have purchased tickets to attend the live event. It was fan interest on Facebook and the AWE website that got the attention of pay-per-view providers, who see a tremendous opportunity with the AWE brand.
The explosion of interest in AWE is built around the real-life drama between Kevin Nash and Ricky Morton of the Rock-n-Roll Express, whose animosities dating back to their WCW days have made their way into mainstream media with interviews dating back 10 years. After signing the main-event match for Night of the Legends pitting Nash and his tag-team partner, Doug Gibson, against The Rock-n-Roll Express in June, AWE used Facebook and YouTube to draw fan interest in the match with a series of videos starring the participants.
“For a new company to generate this type of fan craze by using the power of the Internet via Facebook and Youtube has never been seen before in the history of professional wrestling,” Graham said.
“Wrestling fans are tired and burnt out on current wrestling programs seen on TV today. Weekly shows have drifted away from the rich tradition of old school wrestling that I grew up watching. You don’t get the feeling that it’s the good guy versus the bad guy or the believability that the opponents truly dislike each other with today’s wrestling. The real-life drama that two people dislike each other and really want to fight is what’s missing from wrestling. AWE will bring back to fans the tradition of professional wrestling that has been missing for such a long time,” Ward said.
For more information on Awesome Wrestling Entertainment
Website: www.awesomewrestlingentertainment.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/awesomewrestlingentertainment
