Getting to know Will Allday before Impact Wrestling Deep Impact on Twitch

Patches Chance: What has it been like training under Booker T at Reality of Wrestling?

Will Allday: It’s kinda surreal. The guy you see on your TV for WWE is not a character, that’s [Booker T] in real life. He is this over the top personality when you’re with him every day. That’s just who he is, and that’s why he’s so good at what he does because he doesn’t have to fake it. That’s truly him. He’s funny. It’s cool being around him because he’s got so much insight and so much knowledge on things that you’d never think of, and all these little intricacies that happen in wrestling.

He knows all of it. So I’ll sit down with him and I’ll watch my stuff and ask him little stuff that I can do to get to that next level. And he always has an answer, and he always has something to say to help push me to get to a different level. I really appreciate that, because not everybody has a 2-time WWE Hall of Famer at their disposal, so I don’t take that for granted.

Patches Chance: You recently capped off a rivalry with Brendan Steen in ROW with a Ladder Match. Was that your first time in a ladder match? What was that experience like?

Will Allday: That was my second ladder match. I think like my fifteenth match ever, I had a ladder match. And obviously, being your first one, you don’t really know what you’re doing. You’re kinda like feeling out how you’re supposed to structure these things, how you’re supposed to work the crowd. The hardest part about that is going up that ladder so freakin’ slow. Because you can’t just waltz straight up the ladder or else the match would be over. That, and being a newer person, you wanna do things quickly. You just don’t have the patience yet. And so, thank god I had that experience a handful of months into my career.

That really got me ready for a year and a half into my career. I knew the pacing. I knew how to structure it. I’d had really good chemistry with this guy Brendan Steen. And it’s the third match in our program, and I think two of the matches I’ve had with him are two of my top five favorite matches I’ve had of all time. So I knew it was gonna be special. I knew it was gonna be easy. We had some cool stuff planned.

It was really cool to see everybody’s reaction to the match because they’re really proud of like what we had put together. They’re really proud of not just the spots, but the emotional investment that people made into us there at ROW. And so that alone made it special, because the crowd’s waiting and watching and they’re into it the whole time. We’re doing all this cool stuff and they’re just kinda sittin’ there because they’re so into it.

They’re not as loud as we want them to be because they’re truly truly invested, and once we hit this backflip off the ladder they just go—and we actually give them time to settle and have them come into the match, they just start going nuts. I think right there, when we’re just laying down in the middle of the ring, I was just like ‘hell yeah, we got ‘em man.’ I think that feeling right there made it worth it. Made all the hitting the ladder, falling off the ladder, all that worth it. Just a really good payoff.

Having these people emotionally invested, I think that’s the coolest feeling in the world. Instead of just like a really crazy spot to where they’re gonna react because I’m jumping off the roof or something like that. Nah, they’re reacting because they love the story and they really really like this good guy versus bad guy thing we’ve been telling. And the culmination of that was truly rewarding. And I couldn’t have done it without Brendan Steen. Man, he’s probably my favorite opponent of my career so far. He’s just amazing, man. Really cool.

Patches Chance: Impact Wrestling is having a joint show with Reality of Wrestling on July 6 called Deep Impact that will stream live on Twitch. How exciting is it to get the opportunity to be a part of that?

Will Allday: It’s really cool. It’s another platform for Texas wrestling to show what it’s all about, because I think Texas wrestling gets a bad rap because it’s far away from everything. Like, Texas is its own world. You have the west coast, you have the northeast, you have the midwest, you got like Florida.

Patches Chance: Texas is kind of an island to the rest of the US.

Will Allday: Yeah, it really is. And I’ll go to bat, I’ll fight to the death to say that I think Texas wrestling is some of the best wrestling out there. I think some of the performers there are some of the most solid performers you have anywhere in the US, truly. And I think the bigger platform and the more eyes we get on us, people will really start respecting and seeing that.

I think now, you had the bubble to where hot wrestling was in the northeast and then it was in the midwest, and now I truly think that the next big wrestling bubble is gonna be Texas. I think we’ve got so many great promotions, and Impact Wrestling coming here is really gonna get more eyes on us to get some respect on Texas wrestling because we’ve got awesome awesome promotions like Reality of Wrestling.

We have awesome promotions like WrestleCircus, like Lion’s Pride, like Inspire. We have all these great promotions that people really truly just need to see, just need to give it a chance, and they’ll be like ‘oh, my god. These guys are amazing.’ And that’s gonna give us a chance to go out to different areas of the country and be like, you need to bring Will Allday here. You need to bring Ryan Davidson here. You need to bring Cam Cole, you need to bring Gino.

All these dudes will now start getting a chance in other parts of the country once people start seeing us, and I think that’s gonna be huge with Impact Wrestling coming into town. I think it’s gonna be very very big for us, and I can only thank Kevin Bernhardt, who’s like a producer at ROW, and Booker T for making it happen.

Patches Chance: Okay, what does Kevin not do? Because I get the impression he does everything in ROW.

Will Allday: He really does, dude. Jack of all trades. He’s the guy who makes it work. He’s the editor, he’s the producer, he’s the director, he’s the writer.

Patches Chance: He pulls everything together?

Will Allday: He truly does. Him, Brad Gilmore, Matt Topolski, who are the both of the announcers for ROW, which they’re phenomenal by the way. I truly think they’re the best commentary team in the game right now. But them, and then Booker. So it’s like a four-man team, really. They put everything together, and that’s like—like what you see at Reality of Wrestling, it’s all them writing it and producing it, but Kevin’s really, once the show goes off the air, Kevin’s the guy putting it all together. He’s the glue that holds everything together.