Joey Janela: Pro wrestling’s ‘Bad Boy’ on the rise

Each spring, professional wrestling fans from all over the world flock to one city to witness the biggest event of the entire year in the industry, WrestleMania, presented by the pro wrestling monopoly that is World Wrestling Entertainment. With ‘Mania annually taking place on a Sunday evening, fans for the better part of the past decade have been able to pass the weekend time by attending various independent shows throughout the host city. In 2017, there was a show presented by New Jersey promotion Game Changer Wrestling (GCW) that had social media buzzing — Joey Janela’s Spring Break.

The “Bad Boy” Joey Janela, one of the top stars of GCW and now one of the top independent wrestling stars, was the headlining name on a quirky, buzz-worthy show that happened to start a little after midnight ET on March 30. It was definitely the hot topic of this year’s WrestleMania weekend; not too bad for a New Jersey kid who snuck into the wrestling business at the age of just 16.

“In 2006, I was 16 years old,” Janela recalled. “I knew somebody, a local professional wrestler, and I asked him how to get into the business. He told me to come with him and set up rings for his promotion. He told me I can just get in there and feel it out. I told him, ‘Okay, sounds cool.’

“Then a few months later, I kinda lied to the promoter, telling him I was a trained wrestler and I trained at this school, but it was all a bunch of bullshit. So I ended up wrestling my first match after I stepped into the ring probably three times. I wrestled my first match at 16, which is crazy because I kinda snuck my way through the back door [laughs].”

Formal professional training or not and little white lies told aside, Janela was off and running on his professional wrestling journey, a journey that takes its toll on even some of the most mature of adults who give it a try. The only thing left to do at this point was to get brought in by a bigger independent promotion, so he could start honing his wrestling skills on a larger platform. That’s what happened, although not without a minor hiccup. While Janela now regularly competes for one of the longest-running independent promotions in Philadelphia’s Combat Zone Wrestling (CZW), he was supposed to start working there much sooner.

“I was slated to work there in 2009, when I was 19 years old,” Janela remembered. “I started training there, but something fell through or something else happened and I just kinda gave up on it. So I actually didn’t wrestle in CZW until about 2015.

“But Pro Wrestling Syndicate was a big promotion in New Jersey, they’re not around anymore, I was wrestling for them as a character called ‘Starman,’ which kinda got a lot of exposure because it was based on a video game so it got a lot of publicity on video game websites and such. That was kinda my first taste of some bigger things.”

The “Starman” persona for Janela was a good start to getting himself out there in the competitive world of independent pro wrestling, but it’s ultimately been his “Bad Boy” gimmick the past couple years that has people and social media continually throwing his name to the masses. So, how exactly does one in professional wrestling go from being the “Starman” to the “Bad Boy”?

“I was kinda in the middle of doing gimmicks,” Janela said. “I was calling myself the ‘Zebra Kid’ because I was wearing zebra pants and I was doing kind of a Brian Pillman ‘Loose Cannon’ gimmick. [Laughs] I don’t know how that mixed in with being a zebra, but I guess it worked at the time for wherever I was working.

“One day I went on Facebook and wrote a status at the beach and all the girls were winking at me going, ‘Who’s this bad boy?’ Someone shared it with the guys of Ring of Honor, and one of my friends from ROH, Rhett Titus, told me, ‘You should be the BAD BOY!’ I said, ‘That sounds ridiculous!

“Well we’d do shows, then say we’d go to the liquor store or whatever afterward for some alcohol. We’d go up to the cashier and and he’d go, ‘You know who this is? This is the BAD BOY!’ So, I just kinda ran with it, I guess.”

And just like that, from one little Facebook post — the “Bad Boy” was born and he hasn’t stopped tearing it up since, making his way from promotion to promotion, wrestling anyone from top names of the past to other rising stars such as himself, all the while, entertaining fans all over the country in the process.

Still, nothing has gotten Janela’s name out there more to date than the Spring Break show that took place in Orlando, Florida this past weekend. The show named after him had everything from an unusually late East Coast start time, to a battle royal-type match that featured former heavily-hyped WCW superstar Glacier, an invisible man and Dink the Clown which was hilariously titled, “Joey Janela’s Clusterf*ck,” to a dream main event pitting UFC legend and former professional wrestler Dan “The Beast” Severn against one of the more well-known commodities on the professional wrestling scene right now, former UFC star Matt Riddle. And of course, Janela himself was in action as he wrestled former WWE superstar and former Rockers partner of Shawn Michaels, Marty Jannetty.

It’s pretty easy to see why this show was generating the buzz that it did during undoubtedly the biggest pro wrestling weekend of the calendar year. And it actually came together rather quickly.

“It was crazy,” Janela said, thinking back. “GCW (Game Changer Wrestling) were offered a midnight spot by Gabe [Sapolsky] and Sal [Hamaoui] on WWN (World Wrestling Network), and they were like, ‘How do we make this work?’ Because GCW was gravitating toward a deathmatch audience, we weren’t sure how to make it work at first; we really couldn’t do a deathmatch show on this platform.

“So I was kinda picking up steam on Twitter and social media from all the craziness that I’d done in the past year, and I’m one of their guys, so they asked if they could put my name on the show and try to book something. I said yeah, but if we were gonna do it, we were gonna have to go full force with it. We can’t just slack off with this and just book some bullshit.”

The original plan for Riddle in the main event of the show was to face a UFC legend from the early years of the promotion, but it wasn’t Severn. Rather, it was another former UFC/WWE superstar, Ken Shamrock, who, with all due respect to Severn, carries a little more name recognition than the man known as Dan “The Beast.”

But as is common on the independent scene, especially when it comes to some of the stars from years past, money was an issue in getting Shamrock on board.

“So we started talking, and within a day, I wanted to book Ken Shamrock vs. Matt Riddle,” Janela admits. “We were looking at names at a local convention and we saw Ken Shamrock was there so we had to try and book him. We talked about it a little more, then we hit up Shamrock — but he wanted $10,000. That … wasn’t gonna happen.

“From there, we kinda settled on Dan Severn vs. Matt Riddle; that ended up being our first booking idea. Turns out, Severn only wanted about 15 percent of what Shamrock had asked for, so it was a no-brainer. As soon as we had that confirmed, I said let’s make a graphic and announce this show. Everything was done in about three days, from us getting the show, to us announcing the show and the first match on the card. It all happened pretty fast.”

Shamrock financial difficulties aside, the entire show definitely lived up to the hype it had drawn. At one point, one of the most outside-the-box pro wrestling shows you could dream up was a trending topic on Twitter, thanks to Janela for having a vision from the very beginning and putting it together.

While Janela was not the main event on this show — a show that carried his name — he still had a marquee bout Marty Jannetty. Of course, during the bout, speculation ran rampant as to whether or not Jannetty, who has publicly dealt with alcohol issues in the past, would be clean for his spotlight performance. It’s not uncommon for some independent wrestlers to show up inebriated to a date, especially some of the old-timers who have battled demons.

A few times throughout the match, and especially during his brief post-match promo, it could certainly have seemed as if the former Rockers member was under the influence of alcohol. Slurring a bit following his loss to Janela, Twitter burned up with speculation that we were witnessing a drunk Marty Jannetty addressing the hottest crowd of the weekend outside of Camping World Stadium in Orlando.

So to answer the question that’s been asked by some for months: Was Marty Jannetty under the influence during his match with the “Bad Boy”? Well, kinda …

“He wasn’t drunk … that was the thing! I kept him sober,” Janela said, who has known Jannetty for a few years now from the wrestling business.

“Marty had recently broken his ankle, and earlier in the day he did a seminar where he f***ed it up even more and could barely walk. He wanted to take a few painkillers, so I told him to go ahead and take a few.

“That’s what happened. He wasn’t drunk. When he was cutting that promo [after the match] that’s when the Vicodin kicked in.”

The show was every bit the hit everyone involved wanted it to be, which immediately led to speculation they’d try to pull it all off — or better yet, top themselves — again next year when WrestleMania 34 heads to New Orleans. Hell, a show such as this with all the eccentricities under the sun is tailor made for a place like NOLA.

Which really made it no surprise for Janela to reveal they will be giving this whole venture another go down in the Big Easy. But as for topping themselves? Well, yeah, they have a plan in mind that potentially could make this one of the more memorable independent wrestling shows in a very, very long time. Why? Well, because there seems to be a good chance it’ll receive some mainstream media attention.

“Oh yeah, we’re doing it again. It’s already been announced … kinda,” Janela proudly proclaimed.

“It’s big,” Janela admitted of the celebrity they’re close to getting to be a part of the madness.

“What we’re thinking about is big — like, movie star big. It’s gonna dwarf last year. If we get this person announced and it goes through, it’ll be on every news website and every entertainment website; it’ll be on everything. Somehow, this is a A-List movie star, and it’s all coming together right now. This wasn’t even my idea, it was GCW’s idea to pull this off, and not even I could believe it.”

Janela is keeping mum on who this celebrity is at the moment, but in all likelihood, there’s a chance we’ll see him in the ring with another name from the past, much like was the case at Spring Break against Jannetty? Having marked Marty off the list now, there are still a few names on the list of legends the “Bad Boy” still would like to step into the squared circle with.

“Man, I’ve wrestled a lot of them already. I really like the oddball names of the past; a lot of the guys that are, like, enigmas of the past and you don’t get to see too often,” Janela said. “I got to wrestle Scott Norton, Marty and now I’m wrestling Glacier coming up.

“Still, you know, there’s a few I have on my list that I’d like to get in the ring with — Terry Funk, Jerry “The King” Lawler, maybe Hulk Hogan [laughs].

“A lot of these guys are just falling into our laps now, you know? I was just booked into a match with Gillberg. How can you say no to that? It’s just, like, so ridiculous, you know?”

The 28-year-old brings up a good point as to how the independent scene has changed over the years. What once was a portion of the wrestling industry you could really only view on DVD if you were lucky, has grown into an entity of the pro wrestling business that regularly brings in some top names of the past and utilizes current up-and-coming talents who have sort of become master self-promoters to help grow their brand and prosper in their career. And this isn’t just in pro wrestling.

“When I first broke in, Ring of Honor was the big deal then. But it was a different type of ROH than it is today,” Janela reminisced. “There were only a few big independent promotions that were around at the time. ROH, CZW, IWA Mid-South — that was it as far as most of the United States.

“No one sold their old merchandise back in the day; no one sold their own t-shirts or anything like that. Nowadays, merchandise and stuff like that, it’s kinda like a Do-It-Yourself era. But this isn’t only in wrestling, it’s the same thing in the hip-hop industry and other forms of entertainment. A lot of comedians these days are filming their own stuff and uploading it to YouTube, and some are getting TV roles from this.

“I guess it’s that generation of millennials — is that what they call us [laughs]?”

In case you haven’t observed through his rise on the independent scene, Joey Janela is one of the best self-promoters out there in the wrestling business at the moment.

But the reason independent pro wrestlers like Janela promote themselves and put their bodies through misery on the independent scene is so they ultimately can move on to bigger and better things at some point in the near future. For Janela, the immediate goal is to make some coin with another rising entity in the professional wrestling industry at the moment, New Japan Pro Wrestling.

“Yeah, that’s, like, definitely my main goal [New Japan],” Janela admitted. “That might even be the goal over  WWE for right now. WWE, though, is my ultimate goal, of course WWE is the goal, but I do want to make money over in Japan.”

Janela actually has some help in the pursuit of lining his pockets overseas in the Land of the Rising Sun in the form of a New Japan legend who also happens to hail from the United States. Former WCW superstar Scott Norton, who twice held the IWGP Heavyweight Championship (1998 and 2001), has developed a fondness for the “Bad Boy” and would love to help him in this quest.

“I’ve been wrestling Scott Norton a few times lately, and he loves me, so he’ll recommend me to anyone,” Janela noted. “He wants to get me over the Japan as soon as possible, which is weird because watching some of my stuff, you don’t know if I’d fit their style. But, I can kinda wrestle any style.

“I really just feel like Japan would benefit me in the long run when it comes to in-ring work and performance. I already have the character and the charisma down. I just feel it could benefit both sides, you know? Japan’s always looking for characters these days and I’m looking to benefit by wrestling some of those guys.”

People right now are probably wondering, for example, what a match between Janela and one of New Japan’s top stars — and quite frankly, one of the most well-known wrestlers on the planet right now who doesn’t work for WWE — Kenny Omega would produce, and Omega just happens to be maybe his favorite performer to watch right now.

“Right now, I really like Kenny Omega. He’s just the most outside-the-box guy, you know? You never know what you’re gonna get with this guy and he’s just an amazing performer.”

With the way New Japan is currently growing and with the wrestlers they’re constantly bringing in, it would surprise no one to see Janela over in a place like Korakuen Hall sooner rather than later mixing it up with some of the top names over there. But when it comes down to it, for most out there striving to succeed in the professional wrestling business, signing a contract with WWE is where Janela sees himself five years from now. Well, that, or not on this earth anymore trying to get there.

“Where do I see myself in five years?,” Janela wondered quickly. “WWE — or dead [laughs]. Hell, hopefully I’ll be performing at WrestleMania. The good thing is, five years from now I’ll be 33, so I’ll still be young.”

When it comes to professional wrestling, especially here in the year 2017 with the amount of dream scenarios that we’ve already witnessed, you never know how things will turn out for a particular performer. Janela could turn up in WWE a year from now or five years from now. He could turn up in New Japan six months from now or two years from now.

We don’t know the answer as to which will be the next big promotion to utilize the services of the “Bad Boy,” but we do know that while he continues his journey, he’s remembering exactly why he does what he does for a living.

“I’m wrestling for me and the fans — that’s it,” Janela said emphatically. “I’m a fan of the business and I research social media and Twitter enough that I know what fans like. I guess I’ve hit the nail on the head so far because it’s working for me. I’m wrestling for me and the fans, and not anyone else.

“That’s good, because if I’m wrestling for me, you’re gonna get matches out of me where you know I’m never gonna mail it in.”