Andrew Bowers reflects on the beginning of NORTH Wrestling in the UK.
In 2016, NORTH Wrestling debuted as a promotion in the north of the United Kingdom and has since gone on to host a litany of events in the past eight years. Stars from across the UK and Europe have found themselves competing in NORTH, including the likes of Joe Hendry, Leon Slater, Michael Oku and more.
While speaking to Fightful's Corey Brennan in a recent interview, NORTH owner Andrew Bowers reflected on North's first event as a promotion.
"So I think it all started back in the day about in 2016, I went to a wrestling show, like a British wrestling show, like that was essentially on my doorstep. That's how lazy I was being. Probably how little i knew about British wrestling at that point. I'd known bits like in the early 2000s and kind of kind of tailed off a little bit around uh 20 yeah 20 like the 2010s uh but it was a wrestling promotion based up north shields called um where i'm from called absolute Wrestling. And it was class like to see this standard of what british wrestling was i was like i was really blown away by it. So I don't know like This is the story I always go back to as well. I've come further in my career, but I was playing Extreme Warfare. I would always go back and play that. And I was really ill after seeing this show. I got tonsillitis. I was just coming up to it. I was in my late 20s. Oh, no, no. I was in my early 30s, and I was like, I'm in bed with tonsillitis. Just seeing this really cool British wrestling show. I'd emailed them and been like, hey, do you need any help at a show of which i now know how many emails promotions get that along those lines? They were like, no, we're fine. Thanks. I was like okay and I was like sitting playing extreme warfare and I was like I should probably try this for real. Like, let's just start emailing people. Weirdly, Liam Slater was one of the first people i emailed, and he's still very uh involved in the promotion now. It kind of just snowballed from there. It's like, I emailed a couple of wrestlers. I realized that I had enough money to kind of pay them. I emailed a venue in Newcastle, which was ICW had run a couple of shows there called the Riverside. I was like, let's just see. The guy managing that venue at the time, he got on well from the offset and it just snowballed from there. It was one of those things where it was like, oh man, like this has to happen now. I've committed in. So yeah, the first show we had, we had Will Osprey booked for it as well. He had just won best of the super juniors. So it was like, oh man, this is going really well. We told 160 tickets as well. Which wasn't too bad for your first ever show. And then 12 hours before the show started, uh, well, 24 hours before the show started, Will Osprey pulled out with an injury. I don't know. Since then, it's just gone from what that like really small beginning of, you know, and it wasn't just, you know, I've got a background in bands and music and um, I'd put events on and things like that before. So it was kind of like turning my hand to a complete separate passion that I'd never really worked within. It just snowballed. And then, yeah, first show went pretty well. Second, third, fourth, not so well. Then, yeah, now how we've got here today is a completely different story, but yeah, pretty humble beginnings, I think."
For the full interview with Bowers, you can find it here.
For more interviews with UK talent and promoters, you can find them on our Fightful Scraps channel here.
