The Bouncers, Beer City Bruisers and Brawler Milonas, were excited to be with Ring of Honor for the long haul.
The Beer City Bruiser and Brian Milonas have talked about why they were excited to be on the Ring of Honor roster. Prior to recent changes, they had planned to be with the company exclusively for a long time to come as Ring of Honor chose to sign both men to exclusive agreements.
Speaking with Sean Ross Sapp prior to Ring of Honor choosing to go on hiatus, Brawler and Bruiser talk about Ring of Honor and making the decision to sign them and their goals for the future with the organization.
Fightful: “I pointed at a guy like Sledge as a good example. He quietly signed with ROH right before the pandemic and nobody knew it because they didn’t get to really kick him into gear when the pandemic started. They re-signed him—not blindly—but they hadn’t really even got a great look at him on ROH TV yet and they resigned him. A lot of people were like, ‘Re-signed? We didn’t know that he had signed,’ because of the pandemic. He went on record with me. He was like, ‘Man, they didn’t have to do that.’ He’s like, ‘Man, they could have been like, ‘We’ll cut what we got here. It didn’t work out. Maybe we’ll try again down the line.’ He was like, ‘I got paid, got re-signed. They treat me well.’ I think that says a lot about Ring of Honor and really putting their money where their mouth was after they had all of you come in to talk about all you wanted changed and how you wanted to be treated and all of that. That meeting has always spoken a lot to me about how they treat people. So I think that was really good.”
Beer City Bruiser: “They re-signed us. Brian and I were worried because our contracts came up in January. We were worried if we were going to get re-signed since it was in the middle of a pandemic. It was one of the easiest contract negotiations I think we’d had. We were both happy. Not only that they re-signed us, but they re-signed us to exclusive deals. It was like, ‘Awesome!’ This company’s great. You feel respected as a performer. You feel valued with the company.”
Fightful: “Do your deals pretty well match up? I know there are a lot of companies that like their teams to have deals—not financially, that’s quite frankly none of my business—as far as length and all that? Is that pretty well how it is? They want you guys on the same sort of deal, length-wise?”
Brawler Milonas: “Yeah.”
Beer City Bruiser: “Yeah.”
Brawler Milonas: “We’re both on a one-year deal. I know both of our goals are to stay here in the long term. But yeah, they’re gonna match us up. The Bouncers are here to stay.”
Beer City Bruiser: “Brian and I, we both talked privately before everything came up and we both have ideas of what we wanted and we talked about it. Brian and I are excited about the Bouncers. We like what we have. We think we can go anywhere with it. So we wanted to make sure we were a team going into negotiations. Which is a rare thing nowadays. You haven’t heard of that in years. It’s always Shawn left Marty when they were doing their stuff. Brian and I are like, ‘We’ve worked hard to get where we’re at.’ Now we have something the fans are latching onto. We want to make sure we can keep that.”
Brawler Milonas: “I’ll just be real careful if Bruiser invites me to a barbershop somewhere, you know?”
Fightful: “I do like hearing that, because I think it surprised a lot of people when the former Billie Kay and Peyton Royce were like, ‘We’re a package deal now. We don’t care what happened on WWE TV. We’re a package deal. We know we’re valuable together. We know what we have.’ It worked out really well for them. So it seems you guys know this is going to work out really well for you guys. It seems like you all are really happy in Ring of Honor.”
Beer City Bruiser: “Yeah. You gotta bet on yourself. Brian and I, we bet on ourselves. We take chances together. The only ‘Okay’ I need to get when we do things with the bosses is Brian’s. I don’t need to get an ‘Okay’ from anybody else. I can text Brian, ‘Here’s an idea.’ We talk. We’re a married couple, so we argue and stuff. The bottom line is, what you see before you is us as a unit. Like I said, that hasn’t been heard of since the infamous story. Shawn left Marty and ever since then tag teams are like that. Bret left Neither. All that stuff happens and we don’t want to do that. We want to be a unit. We want to be something like the IIconics are doing. It’s rare, but it’s so rare now that it’s a good thing. It’s a gimmick now. People like that.”
Brawler Milonas: “We are happy in Ring of Honor. I’ve said it to people there. It’s probably the dumbest think I could say to you, but this is where I want to be. I don’t have a desire to go someplace else. It’s one of those things, too, I have such a trust in them and the faith. I don’t have the desire to go somewhere else. I don’t have the desire, that itch to go do other things. I’m very happy for me and for both of us, really. I don’t want to totally speak for the Bruiser, but we were guys who heard ‘No’ a lot and it took us a long time to break through and get that break. I feel a great sense of loyalty to Ring of Honor, to Joe and Greg and Hunter and the whole crew there because they’re the first ones to ever look at me and say, ‘Yeah, we want you.’ There was always, whenever I’d do something for WWE or whatever, it would be like, ‘We think you’re really good. We have an interest in you, but you’re fat.’ Okay, I get that. I understand. So for them they were able to not just harp on my negatives but look at the things I could do positive. They were the first ones to say ‘Yes’ to me, they were the first ones to say ‘Yes’ to Bruiser after we heard the word ‘No’ well over a decade each. It means a lot and I feel very loyal to Ring of Honor.”
Beer City Bruiser: “The thing too, they’re very open to our creative ideas. Brian and I are both creative guys. We’ve been around. The cool thing about Ring of Honor is if we have an idea, we can pitch it. There’s no worries. You always hear about people talking up in WWE, they’re afraid to pitch ideas. In Ring of Honor, you don’t have to have that fear. You can pitch an idea. They might say, ‘No,’ which is their right, but at least you had that opportunity to pitch the idea and try something. Sometimes they say, ‘Yes,’ and it takes off. I like that. I’m very creative. Brian is creative. When we travel, we pitch ideas to each other. Like, ‘Hey, we should pitch this idea. Let’s see what this does.’ We’ve pitched ideas that the company has gotten behind and it’s gone really well. We’ve pitched ideas that we thought were great, they didn’t think were so great. So we didn’t do them.”
The Bouncers are now free agents and are open to a potential run in the NWA and elsewhere. Check out more concrete contract information in the world of wrestling via our resources section.