PROGRESS Wrestling: David Starr would make a perfect top star

PROGRESS Wrestling’s Super Strong Style 16 tournament has come and gone. Live in front of the Alexandra Palace in Heringay, London, David Starr won the whole shebang.

David Starr resiliently fought off some stiff competition throughout the tournament. Particularly in the finals where he took on a game Jordan Devlin. The former trainee to Finn Balor made for a formidable opponent, but at the end of the match, The Product was the man to have his arm raised as confetti reigned from the skies.

Now, Starr is guaranteed a future PROGRESS World Championship shot against newly double champion, WALTER. This means that the self-proclaimed Cream in Your Coffee is one step away from potentially becoming the new face of PROGRESS Wrestling, a mantle which WALTER has held for over 280 days now.

If David Starr truly does make that massive leap in his career as the new face of PROGRESS, he would be the perfect fit. The 104-Minute Man already perfectly exemplifies the values of PROGRESS Wrestling in the name of social justice.

Since day one, PROGRESS has been all about promoting an inclusive wrestling community where everyone – regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or anything – is welcome. The mantra is literally in their tagline which they’ve often splattered across their t-shirts: Everyone Welcome. Every step of the way, PROGRESS has stuck to their motto and lived up to it every chance they had.

PROGRESS prides itself on providing a safe space for wrestling fans of all shapes, colors and sizes; just as pro wrestling should be and, frankly, as everything should be. PROGRESS is a place where the pansexuality of Jack Sexsmith can be celebrated and where Sexsmith can be a main event headliner, just as he headlined the biggest wrestling show in Manchester against Travis Banks last year.

Meanwhile, David Starr remains on his own mission to create an inclusive space within the confides of professional wrestling. Starr proudly represents his Jewish heritage in every match, going as far as to stitch the Star of David into all of his trunks. No matter where he goes, he wears his heart on his sleeve. If he sees a social injustice taking place before his eyes, he always feels compelled to speak on it.

As seen in the above video, Starr called out some crowd members throwing loose change at him in an act of antisemitism. More recently, he called out Ring of Honor and the Sinclair Broadcast Group for being “a far right wing extremist corporate propaganda machine.” Sinclair asked Starr to take his tweet promo down after the fact, but the fact remains that even when he was days away from competing for the ROH Title in Israel, Starr would risk his own skin by saying something so controversial because he simply believed it was the right thing to do.

That’s what social justice is all about. Hell, in many ways, that’s what PROGRESS Wrestling is all about. If these two superpowers within the wrestling community worked closer together with Starr as the company’s top star, they could make a huge difference.

In his own right, David Starr is simply a tremendous talent. He can go in the ring like it’s nobody’s business and he has some spellbinding charisma to boot. As both a wrestling personality and as a person, David Starr embodies everything PROGRESS is all about. He’d fit right in at the top of that mountain and could do a lot to help promote PROGRESS’s message of diversity to wider audiences.

PROGRESS is for everyone and David Starr is for PROGRESS.