Rocky Romero Opens Up About Struggling To Find Venues For NJPW In The US
Rocky Romero is looking for the best venues for NJPW.
This year’s G1 Climax will kick off at the NOW Arena in Chicago on Saturday, July 11. This will be the first time that NJPW has hosted the first night of tournament in the United States since 2019, when it was hosted at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.
Speaking with Fightful for a new interview, Romero talked about Dallas being the wrong place for the event in 2019.
“I think we’re looking at anywhere from like three to four times a year, once a quarter or so kind of makes sense. Then just like this card going all in on it. The focus is to do one show every quarter or so. So it’ll start with this one, New Beginning, and then in the summertime, we’ve got the opening of the G1 in Chicago, which I’m extremely excited about. Obviously when we did it in Dallas a couple of years ago, it felt like it wasn’t the right place for it. But Chicago is the perfect market and just a great fan base to bring a show, a specialty show like that to America.”
Continuing on, Romero talked about his struggles with finding mid-size venues in the United States.
“The biggest issue in America is you’ve got two different types of venues. You’ve got really small venues and then really large venues. So it’s really hard to find a venue that fits our capacity perfectly, anywhere from that 2,000-5,000 seat venues. They just don’t exist anymore. So it’s really difficult to find that. We actually worked with AEW and the scheduling folks over at AEW to help us with this arena. So we’re probably going to be working with them hand in hand because they do so many arenas, they have great deals.”
Speaking about some of the budgetary restraints surrounding the shows, Romero noted that he’d rather bring in more stars than focus on extra lighting.
“Because our shows are flying out the amount of talent that we do from Japan or internationally, wherever, our shows are extremely expensive when it comes down to it. So I know a lot of people are always wondering like, ‘Well, why didn’t New Japan do this?’ or ‘Why didn’t they do that?’ We still have a budget that we have to stick to and we would rather bring talent than maybe put it into extra lighting. We want people to be able to experience New Japan. It’s more of a live show than it is anything. It’s always been that way. We’re not a TV company in your traditional sense like WWE or AEW is. We’re grassroots professional wrestling company that’s been around for over 50 years. That’s what we are. We’re a live event company. I’m excited about this one. I think the production is gonna be really good on this show. We’ve upped a lot of things and decided to divert money into certain things. Also you can see in the way the card is stacked, we’re bringing a lot of new faces who haven’t gotten the chance to wrestle for the American fans like Oleg Boltin, like Knock Out Brothers. It’s going to be a great night of wrestling.”
The topic shifted back to venue size, allowing Romero to note that he keeps a running list of venues that AEW visits.
“Always. I have a little checklist of places that we go to with AEW and I look at the cap and I see the amenities of the building and what comes with it. Then I’m like, ‘Oh, this, this could work. This could be a viable option for New Japan.’ So I usually will send that through and have my bosses look at it. It’s cool because I get to be right there in person checking out the venue and it doesn’t cost anything extra or anything. I can just walk around and check it out and ask some questions and then hopefully we could get a deal done.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Rocky Romero spoke positively dual contracts in wrestling. His full comments can be viewed by clicking here.
Fans can check out Fightful‘s full interview with Rocky Romero in the video linked at the top of this article. Check out more of our interviews by visiting our YouTube channel.
Also, remember to catch the replay of NJPW The New Beginning USA on NJPW World.
