On Sunday June 28th the weather was not the best with on and off rain and overcast all day. We decided to hit up a few antique stores and antique malls and do some junking! We were in Laurel, Delaware to go to the Out of the Attic Antique Mall. I never actually made it into this antique store as in the same mall I saw a store front for USW: United States Wrestling, which I didn't know was there.
Whenever I travel somewhere for even 1 night, I'm always looking to see if there happens to be any wrestling shows, or really anything related to pro wrestling for me to check out. That's how I ended up going to 1CW in 2023 when we were down in Ocean City for the week.
In researching this year I discovered USW but they had show the week prior to us coming down. I had no idea about the store front so that was a tremendous surprise!
The owner / promoter / wrestler is second generation wrestler Brian Hardy, who was in the store front this day. Brian has been wrestling for the better part of two decades and running his own promotion for over 15 years.
When you walk in the store the first thing you notice on the far end is the wrestling ring, hard not to! They run the USW Academy here as well as monthly TV tapings for their weekly YouTube show USW Justice. They have a second show that just started up, called USW Call Time, a behind the scenes style show. Also on their YouTube page you can find their PPV shows.
The shop also has various wrestling merchandise from magazines, to action figures, and trading cards. USW has their own series of trading card as well, I picked up a signed one from Brian from their series 9 set of cards.
Brian and I had a fantastic conversation about what we both love, pro wrestling. He told me all about USW, we chatted about what we love about wrestling, the different brands and flavors of pro wrestling and what it means to us. We even have friends in common! This is one of the many reasons that I love pro wrestling, you can meet a complete stranger and walk away friends after a brief conversation thanks to pro wrestling.
One things I noticed behind the counter was a custom Jay Briscoe Ring of Honor World Championship title. I asked Brian about it and he told me that he was close with Jay, that at 14 he would help them set up and tear down the ring. After Jay's passing a mutual friend gifted Brian the belt, to display in the store. USW is in the Briscoe's hometown of Laurel, and Jay's passing hit the community hard.
You can follow Brian on all his social media pages and catch him this August in Japan for Kanjuro Matsuyama's Matsuyamaza Pro Wrestling based out of Osaka.
Follow USW on their social media pages:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theofficialusw/
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Until next time!