Physical Pro Wrestling Hall Of Fame Planned For New York

WWE has inducted many legends into their Hall of Fame, but there is no physical building. There were talks of physical hall of fame in WWE but nothing concrete was done. Vince McMahon was never into the idea in the first place.

While speaking on recent edition of The Wrestling Inc. Daily podcast, International Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame President Seth Turner talked about setting up a physical Hall Of Fame in New York.

“You got to have these opportunities to have up-close, interpersonal exchanges with these legends. We missed that when that was no longer in New York State. Certainly you could go to, potentially, meet and greets and maybe stand in line to get an autograph or something, but that’s not what the hall of fame represented. It was a true museum based on the history of professional wrestling. In New York, a hall of fame is considered a museum, and a museum is an educational institution and that is governed by our New York State Education Department. That’s how we obtained our charter.

I am familiar with that with 25 plus years of working in schools, over 20 years of being a school administrator. How to charter the waters and turn the valves that got us the appropriate licensure that we could do business, but the goal is the brick and mortar museum. We’ve not left our eyes off the prize with that. We are working on that just as diligently as we are in hosting our event. Nothing that I want to report publicly but we’re working together. There’s a faction of us that worked on that explicitly, and who knows, maybe there’ll be announcement soon. We’ll keep working.”

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A physical Hall Of Fame was planned for last year but then the COVID-19 pandemic took place and ultimately scrapped all plans related to it. Turner then revealed how bad the entire situation was for the company.

“There was a point where I thought we were dead in COVID because we were just starting off our fundraisers and then had to cancel, and we had to cancel through PayPal. We were losing 2%, so we had $0, and we were losing 2% of everything we had to refund. We were underwater. COVID was scaring people.

Then you were part of something that dug us out of a hole, and it kind of happened when I quietly went and obtained a pretty important artifact, obtaining Bruno Sammartino’s original title belt. It had just breathed life back into everything, even when there was controversy. People wanted to contend this. I love it because okay, my friend Darrell Sammartino tells me what it is.”

It remains to be seen if a physical Hall Of Fame will become a reality somewhere down the line or not as fans would certainly love it.

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