We spoke to three of the top names in Future Stars of Wrestling about life as an independent wrestler. Here are their stories.
G Sharpe: The World Fighter
Greg Minor grew up wanting to travel the world.
“As a little kid,” he says, “just staring out windows thinking about the rest of the world, I was always fascinated, watching documentaries or just looking at atlases or maps.”
In 2014, Minor gave up his car and apartment, stuffed as much as he could into two bags and started backpacking. As G Sharpe, he’s wrestled in 18 countries on five continents.
Minor, 35, was booked in advance for some of those shows. For others, he would just turn up in a country, inquire about the local wrestling scene and see what happened. That’s how he approached Ireland.
“I just rocked up to the school and said, ‘Hey, guys. I’m Greg,’ ” Minor recalls. “The Irish being the wonderful, friendly, inviting people that they are just took me in wholeheartedly, opened arms, with no questions asked, really.”
He’s spent less time on the road since the pandemic, but Minor, who’s called Las Vegas and Future Stars of Wrestling home for the past 15 years, still travels more than most wrestlers on the local independent scene.
“When you’re an indie wrestler,” Minor says, “you take care of everything. You are your own brand.”
In the big, televised wrestling companies, he says, “They’ll come up with the T-shirt and the catchphrase. They’ll show a highlight reel of me, and people will know all my cool moves.”
It’s a whole different mindset in the indies. Minor finds artists to design his gear as well as the T-shirts he sells, tracks down a company to print them and makes sure the return on his investment is there.
“I have to go out and market myself. I have to talk to promoters. I have to come up with stories. It’s all on you,” Minor says. “The finished product that you see is actually very little of what we actually do. There’s so much more. It’s all-encompassing. But, at the same time, I really dig it. It’s such a fun time.”
Bodhi Young Prodigy: The Walking Talking Cheat Code
“My parents are extremely supportive,” says the wrestler known as Bodhi Young Prodigy.
They’d have to be. They let him become a professional wrestler, sharing the ring with full-grown brutes, at the tender age of 12.
By then, though, he’d already had four years of training in FSW youth classes.
Was it tough to find people who wanted to wrestle him in the beginning? After all, nobody wants to be known as the guy who broke a 12-year-old.
“There was a bit of reluctance,” the now 18-year-old acknowledges. “But I think most of the roster was like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s go for it.’ ”
He’d trained in gymnastics and freestyle parkour before that first match and was able to catch fans by surprise.
“I think there was a very fun dynamic of ‘Who is this kid?’ ” Bodhi says. “And then I backflip, dropkick, yada-yada-yada, BAM! And it’s like, ‘Whoa! I did not see that coming.’ ”
He’s packed on plenty of muscle since those days, but ring announcers still introduce him as weighing “a nifty 150.” That’s up from when he was announced as a “sturdy 140.”
Bodhi graduated from Coronado High School last spring. He’s now a film student at the College of Southern Nevada and just made his first short film.
Despite being a grizzled six-year veteran, his age still presents a few problems when he travels for work. Bodhi can’t rent a car on the road. He is able to check into some hotels, though, with a note from his parents.
He’s also thankful for the FSW fans who’ve literally watched him grow up in the ring.
“It’s very beautiful to see that they see me improve,” Bodhi says, “and I get to have them on the journey with me.”
Brittnie Brooks: The Center of Attention
Brittnie Brooks is making the most of WrestleMania week.
The 21-year-old FSW women’s champion has booked six matches for five promotions, three days of meeting fans at WrestleCon and three other appearances over the course of five days.
“I just think people don’t really understand the grind of it,” Brooks says of the life of an indie wrestler. “My first entire year of wrestling, I didn’t get a single dollar for any of my shows.”
A WWE fan since she was 5 years old, Brooks has been hustling since enrolling in the Arizona Wrestling Federation Academy in Phoenix as a 15-year-old. The youth classes petered out after a few months, so she joined the adults. No one took it easy on her.
“We definitely did some chop lines where there were, like, grown men chopping me,” Brooks says of the open-hand slaps to the chest that are among the most legitimately painful moves in wrestling. “But I didn’t want them to take it easy on me, because I already had that chip on my shoulder.”
To a degree, her hectic schedule is a case of making up for lost time. At the outset, her career was delayed by the COVID pandemic. She tore an anterior cruciate ligament in 2022, then tore the other one in 2024.
On a recent Monday, Brooks worked out at a gym for two hours then trained at the FSW Arena for six. The next day, she drove five hours to Oxnard, California, wrestled, then drove straight back, getting home at 4 a.m. ahead of a 9 a.m. interview.
It’s all in service of her ultimate goal: a WWE contract.
“It’s truly a grind,” Brooks says. “The indies are getting better and better about money and travel. I’m in a very, very fortunate position to where, over time, I’ve built up my name to be able to get those things covered and to be able to live off of wrestling. But it’s definitely still a struggle.”
Contact Christopher Lawrence at [email protected] or 702-380-4567.