For the longest time, I’ve been trying to go watch live wrestling. A few months ago, I went to a really small show, Championship Wrestling From Atlanta, and it turned out to be a lot of fun despite the fact that I knew maybe like two names on the entire card. The venue was small, the attendance was low, and I was sitting two rows from the ring and had a great view the entire night. Unbeknownst to me, a lot of the talent featured that night were all fairly notable names on the indy or not-WWE/AEW world of professional wrestling, and I took the time to educate myself and realize just how out of touch I had become with the industry over the years.
The experience ignited a newfound want to seek out smaller shows, because I’ve done Wrestlemania twice, and several other large WWE and WCW shows back in the day, and as much as I appreciate the big times, I’ve learned that it’s just so much more fun at smaller shows.
But after seeing Championship Wrestling, the last few months have been a comedy of errors at trying to go see moar live wrestling. I had secured tickets to NWA’s Hard Times 2 show, which I was looking forward to immensely due to the card being pretty stacked, but due to the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant, my tickets were cancelled. At least I got a pretty cool consolation prize out of it.
Mythical wife had gotten me some really baller tickets to go see WWE’s Day 1 pay-per-view show, and I know I had just said I was kind over big WWE events, but these were some prime seats that probably would’ve made the event worth it, but then my household was exposed, and I had to punt on going to the show that ended up being pretty noteworthy in that Brock Lesnar ended up winning the WWE title that night.
And then I heard about this show that ran in Atlanta, literally the night after it had occurred, called Terminus, which was apparently being run by the current Ring of Honor World Champion, Jonathan Gresham. Looking at the match list, I was kind of awe-struck at just how stacked of a card it was, and I bemoaned my bad luck at not knowing about it in advance and trying to go check it out.
Fortunately for me, Terminus already had plans to run a second show in February, and with a main event of Gresham against AEW’s Mike Santana already established, it sounded like the perfect event to scratch the itch for some live, smaller-crowd wrestling.
It was frankly just what I was hoping to experience, if not more. The venue changed unexpectedly to the Jurassic ghetto of Morrow, but that didn’t deter me from going. The venue was small, but had a very strong turnout of dedicated wrestling fans, but I was still able to sit second row practically next to the ring, and feel right up on the action the whole night.
The card was pretty loaded, with lots of AEW, Impact, NWA and several freshly-future endeavored WWE talents, so I pretty much knew of someone in every match of the evening save for one or two. And as expected, many of the matches were very good quality, despite the fact that there were some weird rules that were inconsistently applied throughout the night.
As it really should’ve been, the main event of the night between Gresham and Santana really was the best match of the night, and I have to say that I’m really impressed with Santana as a singles guy, because he’s just so synonymous with tag team wrestling, be it from LAX or in the Inner Circle with Ortiz. But obviously, with Ring of Honor coming back in a week, it was obvious that there was no way Gresham was going to lose, but it didn’t deter the fact that it was a great match.
Also, as part of the storytelling, Santana drug Gresham down to his level and forced him to brawl, which meant getting thrown into seats all over the place, including literally right next to my seats. This kind of exposure and access just doesn’t happen in a big-league show, which is why I’m so into small, indy rackets these days.
But overall, Terminus 2 was an awesome show, and I really hope that the promotion sticks around and continues to run shows in the Atlanta area in the near future. Among other options, I would easily go to another Terminus event, because Gresham really knew how to put on an excellent show.
Pictures just because I don’t want them taking up space on my phone:
