When the Pulaski Club in Easthampton closed on short notice in December due to issues with unpaid property taxes, the local wrestling promotion Pro Wrestling GRIND needed a new venue to host its matches.
Now, however, GRIND is gearing up — literally and figuratively — to move to a new regular venue: VFW Post 8006 in Florence.
“The new venue switch [has] really [awakened] us. We have a new area, a new environment that we get to build on, so [there’s] a lot of motivation to come and start the year that much harder,” said Pro Wrestling GRIND co-owner and co-founder Delmi Medrano, who wrestles as “God Queen” Delmi Exo.
Medrano explained that GRIND planned to keep producing events at the Pulaski Club while also holding events at the VFW to expand the company’s reach into Northampton and Florence. The company announced the expansion with a social media post last November, but they weren’t planning to launch at the VFW until later this spring. When the Pulaski Club closed, though, they needed to figure out what to do with those events — and, thankfully, moving them to the VFW worked out.
“The closure definitely adds a kick in the right direction,” Medrano said. “It’s do or die. There is no start-of-season familiarity that fans might feel. It’s a complete unknown, but one that I think we’re embracing.”
Pro Wrestling GRIND will kick off its 2026 season with “Brave New World” at VFW Post 8006 on Friday, Feb. 27, with the first match at 8 p.m.
Both Medrano and David Grimes II, who wrestles as “The Human Monster Truck” Perry Von Vicious, said the VFW has several advantages over the Pulaski Club. The new venue is centrally located, features built-in performance lighting and includes a stage. It is also significantly larger — by Grimes’ estimation, it has twice the capacity for fans. That extra space will likely make for a better overall fan experience, he said, with more room to move around and better vantage points to watch matches. With the move, Grimes added that he is also happy to no longer have to carry parts of the wrestling ring up a spiral staircase.
The event’s “card,” or fight lineup, includes the main event, a match between Grimes and “The Thiccc Daddy” Andy Brown, over the GRIND Grand Champion title that Grimes won last April; a trios tag team match between Medrano, “Moonlight Son” Mike Skyros, “Rabid Honey Badger” Ryan Mooney, and The Lost Boys; “Blue Thunder” Jay Freddie vs. Derek Neal; Jordan Blade vs. Elle Valentine; and a match between “Iron” Rip Byson and “Mind Eraser” Mike Graca.
Grimes said that Pro Wrestling GRIND offers “a very unique product” because of its focus on in-ring action, inspired by Japanese pro wrestling, rather than what he calls “cartoonish” storytelling.
“The whole idea is, rather than the story we’re telling being this very obvious Luke-Skywalker-good-guy versus a Darth-Vader-bad-guy, it’s much more about the competition, and because of that, our matches are much more athletic. They’re much faster-paced,” he said. “I’m six-foot-three and 245 pounds, and even I will occasionally be doing backflips or diving over the top rope, and I’m far from the fastest and most agile guy on the roster. There’s some crazy stuff that goes on. It’s very action-packed, very exciting.”
Grimes, who grew up in Greenfield and now lives in Deerfield, has been wrestling since 2008, after he graduated college. “My career is old enough to vote,” he joked.
He trained with World Wrestling Entertainment legend Tajiri, and his wrestling career has taken him to four continents.
In 2021, two of his best friends, Medrano and her husband Calvin Lachowicz, who wrestles as Rip Byson — Grimes’ tag team partner — opened Pro Wrestling GRIND and wanted him to be part of their events.
“I had a conversation with Rip where I told him, ‘Do not book me, do not put me on your show, unless I will be a net positive. If there are younger guys, if there are bigger guys, if there’s recognizable TV names that are available, do not book me in their place.’ And he took that to heart, and on that first show, I was not booked,” Grimes said.
A few weeks later, though, one of the booked wrestlers got injured, and Grimes was available to fill in. The last time that local audiences had seen him, though, he was a “heel,” a villain character, with a “rich snob” persona. They hadn’t yet seen “The Human Monster Truck,” a good guy — as Grimes put it, “the most vanilla, white-meat babyface” — so he didn’t know what reaction to expect.
“When I came through the entryway, it’s a noise I’ll never forget,” Grimes said. “It was one of the loudest crowd reactions I’ve ever heard. They were instantly on my side, and they stayed that way throughout the whole match. And when I came to the back, I was greeted by Delmi and Rip, who essentially said, ‘Well, we guess you’re booked for good now.’”
Now, he’s getting ready to defend his GRIND Grand Champion title against Andy Brown, who’s originally from southern California but is currently based in Philadelphia. The two first met about a decade ago, but they’ve only wrestled each other once before.
“There’s a little of that tri-state New England rivalry, there’s also a little bit of NorCal-SoCal rivalry, and there’s an interesting dynamic, even stylistically, in the ring, where we’re both heavyweights, for sure,” Grimes said. “But Andy is a bit more flashy, a bit more prone to flips and cartwheels, whereas I’m more of a pick-someone-up-and-chuck-them-recklessly [wrestler], and we’re both known for our strikes, so it’s going to be a very hard-hitting match. I expect to come out of it all marked up. I’m feeling very excited about the match, just for what it can be.”
While wrestling is a central part of Grimes’ life, it isn’t his nine-to-five. Since November, he has worked in development for the Dakin Humane Society, and his devotion to animals follows him home, where he tends to three cats and five chickens. When asked about spending his days protecting vulnerable animals and his weekends slamming opponents to the mat, Grimes laughed. “There’s a lot of funny irony in my life,” he said. For instance, despite his “The Human Monster Truck” persona, he said he drives a Volkswagen Rabbit pickup — an “adorable, teensy little truck” that gets 63 miles per gallon.
“At six-foot-three, I look very funny standing [outside] of it,” he said. “It’s a very ‘clown car’ sort of thing.’”
Medrano, likewise, doesn’t make all of her income from wrestling; she does home improvements, including roofing.
“When I’m not in a wrestling ring, I am on a roof. Two different dangerous things — I figured I’d do them both!” she said.
While it is common for local wrestlers to hold down other jobs, Medrano views independent performers through the lens of the “starving artist” trope — people whose devotion to their craft defines their lives. She noted that indie wrestlers regularly spend their weekends in the ring “when they could be partying, going to clubs, or just wasting time on the couch.”
“But all those wrestlers, they put in so much, and it’s not just what you see on social media,” she said. “It’s not just going to the gym or going to shows. There’s all this background stuff we do with picking our outfits and designing our gear. There’s the eating — what you have to monitor to be able to be strong enough to do this sport. There’s all sorts of things that go into it: the in-ring training, the conditioning that you have to maintain, the hours and hours in a car to get to a show to wrestle for 15 minutes in front of people.
“That’s not possible without heart. You can do that and be brainless doing something like that, but it’s not done well unless you’re passionate and you actually love this,” she continued. “And I think that’s something that people can see when they’re watching us wrestle — they can see how much it means to everyone who’s out there performing.”
Tickets to “BRAVE NEW WORLD” are $20 general admission and $30 front row at grindpuro.eventbrite.com. The company’s next event will be “STORMBRINGER” on Saturday, March 21.
For more information and updates about Pro Wrestling GRIND, visit instagram.com/grindpuro.
