LOS ANGELES — Perhaps you consider professional wrestling to be a form of sport. If that’s the case, then consider Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s annual Battle of Los Angeles tournament to be the equivalent of March Madness, where the stars of tomorrow have a chance to compete under an intense spotlight.

Or maybe you believe in the showbiz side of the spectacle, which is frequently called “sports entertainment.” In that case, consider the three-night tournament to be pro wrestling’s answer to the Sundance Film Festival: The place where the very best independent talent from around the world put their best foot forward in front of the watchful eyes of both industry movers and shakers and the most in-the-know hardcore fans.

“When you survive day three, you feel like you’ve gone through a religious experience,” said Matt Jackson, who along with brother Nick forms the game-changing tag team, The Young Bucks. “You feel like you’ve gained knowledge and are a better person than you were before. It’s a true test of will for everyone involved, including the fans. It’s wrestling and sensory overload, and you feel burnt out in the best way possible at the end of it. BOLA is its own wrestling culture at this point, and creates tomorrows stars.”

The Battle of Los Angeles is where stars are made

The 14th edition of the biggest annual event run by the little wrestling promotion that could goes down on three straight nights starting Friday at the Globe Theatre in Los Angeles, with all tickets at the 1,000-seat venue selling out in minutes.

Those who scored tickets will get in on an indy wrestling event with a track record like no other: Previous winners of the tournament include World Wrestling Entertainment standouts Sami Zayn (2011) and Adam Cole (2012); current International Wrestling Grand Prix champion Kenny Omega (2009); current NXT tag team champion Kyle O’Reilly (2013), and New Japan stars Marty Scurll (2016) and Zack Sabre Jr. (2015).

Expanding the list to competitors who didn’t take home the trophy turns it into a who’s who in pro wrestling: Current WWE champion A.J. Styles; former WWE champ Daniel Bryan; former WWE Universal champion Kevin Owens; the Bucks; current NWA champion Cody Runnels; and Japanese legend Jushin “Thunder” Liger have all plied their trade in the fabled tournament.

And if it wasn’t already obvious that the Battle of Los Angeles is the place where stars are made, consider last year’s version: Three of the four 2017 BOLA semifinalists — champion Ricochet, Keith Lee, and Matt Riddle — have since been signed by the WWE (the fourth, Jeff Cobb, has begun wrestling in the world’s second-largest wrestling company, New Japan Pro-Wrestling).

So how did an event put on by a promotion which has no television show, no streaming deal, still sells old-school DVDs, and only recently moved its home base from a 400-seat American Legion hall in the San Fernando Valley to a new-but-still-small home in downtown LA, become the event wrestlers from all over the world come to be seen?

“This is one of the most organic things I’ve seen in my 40 years covering wrestling,” said former Yahoo Sports MMA columnist Dave Meltzer, the world’s preeminent wrestling journalist. “They didn’t set out to create this big important thing, but like anything else underground that gets popular, word of mouth spreads about the quality and next thing you know it’s the things everyone wants to see.”

View photos Long before Ronda Rousey was a WWE superstar, she was a regular at Pro Wrestling Guerrilla shows in Reseda, California. (Marcus Vanderberg) More

How Pro Wrestling Guerrilla paved the path for All In

PWG was founded in 2003 by a consortium of Southern California-based wrestlers who had been plugging away on the independent scene and wanted to take control of their own careers.

“We just wanted something that was by the wrestlers and for the wrestlers,” said Excalibur, the company’s masked public spokesman. “We got tired of shady promoters and bad conditions and all the usual B.S. and we wanted to take things into our own hands.”

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