Sparks from the ECW inferno spread in multiple directions. Less than an hour from Philadelphia, in Wilmington, Delaware, the East Coast Wrestling Association (ECWA) lured some of the best technical wrestlers in the world to its annual Super 8 Tournament, first held in 1997. Over the years, the event became a showcase for the top indie performers, with names like Christopher Daniels, Low Ki, Petey Williams, Davey Richards, Jerry Lynn and Tommaso Ciampa taking the honors.
“Those Super 8 shows were the real deal,” recalled Philadelphia-area fan Paul Carboni. “We were going to wrestling shows every Saturday night, either ECWA, ECW or CZW [Combat Zone Wrestling].”
In North Carolina, Shane “Hurricane” Helms had become acquainted with Matt and Jeff Hardy and Shannon Moore on the indies. All were fans of styles common in Japan and Mexico, where smaller, audacious wrestlers could sell out the house. “Nowadays, I would have met them on the internet,” Helms said. “Back then, you’d have to search until you found them.”
Every two weeks, Helms and Moore made the nine-and-a-half hour trek to Nashville to work for Music City Wrestling. “The payoff was $40. There weren’t developmental territories back then, but we heard that Music City was one the places that WCW and the WWF paid attention to.”
By Helms’ estimation, the caliber of wrestlers he encountered was below the standards of the Carolinas. “There were guys who didn’t know how to catch the high fliers, who we couldn’t trust to be our base. I had guys dropping me on the floor.”
But he included his Music City highlights on the VHS tape he sent to WCW as the company expanded its roster of cruiserweights. “We heard stories that people would look at these tapes and throw them in the garbage. Matt Hardy was known as High Voltage in OMEGA (the indie that the Hardyz started in 1997 in their hometown of Cameron, North Carolina), and WCW stole his name. As ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin would say: ‘D.T.A. — don’t trust anybody.’”
Nonetheless, WCW hired Helms and Moore in 1999, matching them up with Evan Karaigas in a boy band knockoff unit called 3-Count.
In Montreal, which had long offered a style of wrestling that appealed to the Quebecois palate, a generation of fans raised on the WWF were done with performers like Gilles “The Fish” Poisson and Michel “Justice” Dubois. ”We wanted to be like ECW,” said Manny Elefthriou — aka PCP Crazy Fuckin’ Manny — cofounder of the International Wrestling Syndicate (IWS).
The IWS started as a lark for a collection of students at Dawson College, a school appealing to the city’s Anglophone community, on the grounds of a former nunnery. In 1998, Edward Derozowsky, aka SeXXXy Eddy, got into a worked on-air feud with a fellow deejay on the campus radio station. The pair ended up brawling at the college’s annual picnic, incorporating an ironing board, ladder and filing cabinet. The next year, he founded the Dawson Wrestling Federation, using the school newspaper to build interest in the upcoming matches. In its first and last contest on campus, Eddy executed a move he labeled the “garbage-sault,” holding a garbage can over his head as he moonsaulted onto his foe. A video of the incident quickly circulated around the city’s wrestling community.
A short time later, Manny was in a place called Wally’s Pub when a mutual acquaintance introduced him to Eddy. “You guys should hang out together,” Manny was told. “He knows as much about wrestling as you do.”
As they chatted, Manny noticed that there were four pillars holding up the ceiling. “We wondered if we drilled holes into those pillars and put some ropes up, maybe we could make a wrestling ring. And that’s what we did.”
Teaming up with another friend named Nixon Stratus, the two presented a card called Blood, Sweat & Beers ’99. Although many attendees enjoyed the action, the bar’s other patrons were revolted. “They told us it was because of the thumbtacks and the blood,” Manny said. “But the thing that made them the most angry — no one ever confirmed this, but it’s the truth — was that we were English.”
Manny continued, “At that time, there was probably about 20 indie companies fighting for the same fans. The biggest thing was the shit-talking that we were a bunch of kids who didn’t know what we were doing. Which was 100 percent true. We weren’t even trained yet. But the people were into us.”
The promotion went through a succession of names. It was the Internet Wrestling Syndicate before the International Wrestling Syndicate. Fans called the group Le Fed Canadian Tire because of the auto parts inserted into the matches. In 2000, Wally’s Pub closed, and the company moved to other venues, renting an authentic ring from former Montreal star Paul LeDuc.
Around this time, Wild Rose Productions, a local porn company, partnered with IWS. “They were looking to branch out from porn,” Manny said. “And they had a lot of skills we didn’t. They helped us build this really good website. Eventually, we did a live web show — back when no one else was doing it. And they’d send these hot girls to our shows to get involved in our matches.”
The affiliation with the porn industry enhanced the reputation that the IWS was trying to cultivate. During one show, Eddy pinned Manny after a frog splash from the balcony. At another, a fan suffered a heart attack. In November 2001, Carl LeDuc, Paul’s son, refused to do a job for Eddy, causing an altercation backstage. The younger LeDuc then went out to the ring and began tearing down the company and its fans, mixing real-life details with wrestling hype. Eventually, Manny handed LeDuc a handful of money and had security escort him from the building.
With the relationship with the LeDuc family shattered, IWS was left without a ring. The company briefly rented from another indie, then commissioned local wrestler Iceberg to build one exclusive to IWS.
As with ECW, the controversies only drew a more militant fan base. By age 16, future WWE star Sami Zayn was sneaking into the group’s 18-and-over shows. “He was training with a small local federation in a guy’s backyard,” Manny said. “Before our shows, he’d come to the arena and help put up the ring. He’d lead chants. During breaks, he’d run up and do a 450 splash in the middle of the ring. And I’d chase him away. ‘Get the fuck out of the ring. What the fuck is wrong with you? ’”
Sometime in 2002, one of the scheduled wrestlers didn’t show up. “His opponent said, ‘Just put the kid in the ring.’ So we put a mask on him, and he started doing all these crazy moves he’d learned from watching [Mexican high-flier] Super Crazy. He told me he didn’t know what to do next, so he yelled, ‘Ole, ole, ole, ole.’” The term became his catchphrase. “And then, he was a professional wrestler.”
For the next 11 years, the Syrian-Canadian’s hooded character, El Generico, would become one of the most sought-after commodities on the indies. In 2003, he and Kevin Steen — the future Kevin Owens — would have the first of hundreds of matches that would continue after both were in WWE.
At the time, a mysterious fan who used the online name “Llakor” regularly posted detailed reviews of IWS shows on his blog, When We Were Marks. “He invested hours and hours of his time and energy into writing . . . anything to let the world know about these crazy kids in Montreal who were trying to make some noise,” Zayn tweeted in 2013. “He did this not because he had to or because anyone had asked him to, but because he genuinely believed in us. He helped my career a lot, particularly in the early stages.”
Manny wondered about the man’s identity until they finally met. His name was Michael Ryan and Manny described him as “this geeky Comic Con kind of guy who seemed to be in his forties when we were in our twenties. He volunteered to be our publicist.”
According to associates, Michael Ryan found interactions with normal people challenging, and seemed to live for those moments when he could immerse himself in wrestling. He was also involved in the Young Cuts Film Festival, a yearly Montreal gathering highlighting directors below the age of 30. In 2013, his absence was noticed at an area indie show. He also missed a scheduled card game, as well as several appointments. After failing to reach him, an area promoter called the police in St. Sauveur, Quebec. When they entered his apartment, they discovered that he’d died of a heart attack related to his diabetes.
Wrote Kevin Steen on Twitter, “Michael ‘Llakor’ Ryan did so much for me and my career, more than he ever knew. Never got the chance to tell him.”
By the time of Ryan’s death IWS had gone through numerous incarnations and worked with dozens of promotions, among them Ring of Honor, Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, CHIKARA, wXw in Germany and AAA in Mexico. At CZW’s third annual Tournament of Death in Smyrna, Delaware, in 2004, Eddy was wrestling the Arsenal and sliced open an artery on the left forearm. “Blood started shooting out,” Manny remembered. “Instead of panicking, he held his forearm up and squirted it into his mouth.
“People were saying, ‘Who are these crazy Canadians?’ There was a CZW show coming up at the old ECW Arena, and they asked me to bring my four best wrestlers. I brought Eddy, Excess 69, Kevin Steen and El Generico. They had a wild four-way match that had the fans chanting, ‘IWS.’ No one in the U.S. could name a Canadian indie and now we had a cult following. Seventy-five percent of our DVD sales were in the United States. We were selling DVDs in Japan and Italy. Our guys started getting booked everyplace. We could see there was an explosion going on.”
When WWE would come to the Bell Centre — site of the 1997 Montreal Screwjob, in which the departing Bret “The Hit Man” Hart lost his WWF belt to Shawn Michaels after Vince McMahon ordered a timekeeper to ring the bell in the middle of the match — the IWS performers saturated the building with fliers. “It’s easier now because you can do a Facebook ad,” Manny said. “But we still have a flier team and 6,000 fliers whenever Raw comes to town. If no one knows what you’re doing, no one’s going to come.”
To a certain extent, IWS’ triumphs have come at the expense of “The Mountie” Jacques Rougeau, a former WWF Intercontinental and Tag Team champion, whose family ran Quebec’s Les As De La Lutte (All-Star Wrestling) promotion in the 1970s. In 2001, Rougeau was overseeing his own indie when two of his students defected at an IWS event and joined the rival league.
Most humiliating for Rougeau was that IWS represented everything that he detested about the new direction of the industry. His Spectacle Familial Jacques Rougeau league banned punching, kicking, profanity and alcohol in the arena. “If you’re a wrestling promoter, you should give back to the community,” said Rougeau, whose father and uncle, Jacques Sr. and Johnny, were Montreal headliners and maternal great-uncle, Eddie Auger, wrestled until days before his death from pancreatic cancer. “Get involved with youth hockey, Big Brothers/Big Sisters. If you’re just going in and asking for money, you better be doing something exceptional.”
The high point of Rougeau’s promotional career occurred in 1997, the same year as the Montreal Screwjob. Playing the Quebecois hero, Rougeau booked himself in the main event against Hulk Hogan, then the WCW World Heavyweight champion, on loan from the Atlanta-based conglomerate. The undercard featured local wrestlers like Nelson Veilleux, Sunny War Cloud, Jacques Compois, Richard Charland and Pierre Carl Ouellet — later known as PCO — along with such WCW stars as “The Giant” Paul Wight — the Big Show in WWE — Harlem Heat, Lex Luger and Ric Flair. Hogan later told Slam! Wrestling that he received “a ton of heat” from WCW management for allowing Rougeau to pin him in the non-title match. “It was business and it was the right thing to do,” the Hulkster said. “Jacques was working very, very hard for wrestling in Montreal.”
Jacques’ ultimate goal was following the tradition of promoters like Stu Hart and Fritz Von Erich, who were able to build territories around their sons. Unfortunately, Jacques’ boys, Jean-Jacques, Emile and Cedric, did not share the same love for the business as the Rougeaus of generations past. Cedric was listed as six-foot-seven and 325 pounds, and Jacques was certain that there was a role for him in NXT — a position that would increase interest in Spectacle Familial Jacques Rougeau. But after breaking his leg while trying to execute a 450 splash off the ropes, he fell behind in his cardio at the WWE Performance Center. Privately, each of the Rougeau sons confided to their father that they had no heart for the barnstorming that Jacques and his brother, Raymond, did during their early days. “In Stampede [the Hart family’s Calgary-based territory], you’d do Lethbridge on Monday, Red Deer on Tuesday, Saskatoon on Wednesday, Regina on Thursday, Calgary on Friday and Edmonton on Saturday,” Rougeau said, “all for $35 a night. My sons didn’t want to pay their dues that way.
“They just lost interest. It never was their dream. It was Daddy’s dream.”
In 2018, the promotion ran a farewell show, after which 58-year-old Jacques, 28-year-old Jean-Jacques, 25-year-old Cedric and 18-year-old Emile retired. “This is a very sad time in my life,” Jacques confided. “Sometimes, when I’m home, I start to cry. Seventy-five years of the Rougeau family went down the drain. But I can’t make my sons do something if they don’t want to do it.”
Meanwhile, after declaring itself defunct in 2010, IWS returned four years later, even procuring the services of WWE United Kingdom champion Pete Dunne for a match with IWS Canadian titlist Matt Angel in 2018.
In 2017, the IWS began taping a monthly television show for the French language network RDS. Despite the Anglophone sensibilities of the group’s owners, the ring announcer introduced the combatants in French. Shows were taped without commentary, before a French-speaking team inserted their own play-by-play in the patois of La Belle Province.
“If you can’t see AEW or Ring of Honor or WWE in Montreal, come to see us,” Manny urged. “House shows, we draw 250 people. Large shows, maybe 1,000. But in the summer, if there’s a music festival, we can get 7,000 people to stand there and watch what we’re doing.”
Before a Metallica show, the promotion set up a ring where they knew thousands of fans would be waiting for hours to enter the concert. “It’s not about putting on a show,” Manny stressed. “It’s about creating an atmosphere. If you believe in what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter if the match in the ring sucks. The fans will scream their heads off anyway.”
When the Rougeaus folded up operations, Jacques’ former student, Martin Villeneuve purchased the ring and started Gatineau Professional Wrestling (GPW) — named for the group’s home base, the Knights of Columbus hall in Gatineau, Quebec, near Ottawa — with Derick Clement, Guillaume Charbonneau and Eric Carpentier. To save money, all four partners vowed to wrestle multiple times, under a variety of identities, on the same card. On GPW’s debut show, on October 21, 2018, Villeneuve was both the masked Mummy, as well as a heavily made-up character called The Crow. Clement used the names Predator and Thunder, while Charbonneau played a sheriff and the hooded Knightman. Carpentier wrestled as the crazed Justin Sane and appeared under another guise as a manager for wrestler Paul Jones.
GPW’s G-rated dogma was identical to the philosophy espoused by Rougeau. With an audience consisting almost exclusively of French-speakers, GPW tried to replicate the days when Les As De La Lutte and the Vachon clan’s Grand Prix promotion were competing for dollars in the province. “It’s old-fashioned,” Villeneuve said. “You don’t see 10 near-falls with kickouts. When a guy hits his big finisher, the match is over.”
Before each show, competitors were warned to avoid busting each other open or fighting in the crowd. “If you do anything to make me lose my sponsors,” Villeneuve emphasized, “you’re off the card.”
With some five other indies in the Ottawa area, Villeneuve theorized that promoters were all capitalizing on the “Steen effect” — after Steen successfully transformed into Kevin Owens in WWE. “Everyone here saw him on indies, but with spectacular moves you don’t see him use that much anymore. So the fans know that, when they come to one of these shows, they’re going to see every wrestler giving it their all, hoping that somebody from WWE finds out about them.”
GPW’s first show drew 450 fans, and Villeneuve was heartened that 100 chose to purchase tickets to the next card before they left the building. As he went through the task of purchasing championship belts, ringside barricades and screens to wall off the wrestlers’ changing area, he worried about how many fans would continue to support his product. “We have 600 people who already like our Facebook page,” he said, “so you hope they keep sharing the information we put up. And then, you have to ask yourself how much money do you really want to spend. You can draw 2,000 fans, but spend so much, you would have been better off getting 400 fans into a smaller building that was cheaper to rent.”
But profit was low on the list of incentives driving GPW. “I’m not going to become a millionaire from this,” Villeneuve, a full-time paint store owner, said. “We all have our outside jobs, but this is our passion.”
“You start out thinking you’re going to make money in wrestling,” said Jian Magen, cofounder of Toronto’s Twin Wrestling Entertainment (TWE) with his identical sibling, Page. “But there’s not really money to be made at this level. So you have great experiences, make lifelong friends, bring joy to people, raise money for charity. After our last show, we ended up buying a school bus for special needs kids. Is there anything really better than that? Not for me.”
I first met the Magen twins when I was working on the autobiography of the man they regard as their uncle, the Iron Sheik (the Magens’ father, Bijan, had been a table tennis champion in Iran and practiced at the same facility where a young Khosrow Vaziri wrestled). I loved the Sheik’s stories — brutally driving a member of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers to tears for daring to disrespect Bruno Sammartino, forcing a fan to exercise until he vomited in the gym, slamming the great shooter, Karl Gotch, so hard that he farted, calling the Fabulous Moolah a whore, sneaking an 8-ball of coke across the border for Jake “The Snake” Roberts, invoking the names of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden during a wedding speech — but, unfortunately, the book was never published. While no one ever verified this, I have the impression that somebody very high up at WWE read the manuscript and determined that, when the positives were weighed against the negatives, the Sheik’s unvarnished story didn’t really help the brand.
To this day, it remains the greatest unpublished treasure in the annals of wrestling journalism. And that’s not a work. It’s a shoot.
Either way, the Magens and I became friends. They put me up at their homes while I was visiting Toronto. I appeared in the documentaries they produced about the Sheik and the seminal Sweet Daddy Siki. Perennial hustlers, they’ve called me regularly to talk about everything from their plans to import talent from the Islamic Republic of Iran to invigorating the post-wrestling career of former WWF valet Virgil — a goal that was realized, to a certain extent, in AEW when Chris Jericho included the performer, now known as Soultrain Jones, in the Inner Circle posse.
At an event the twins promoted specifically for Orthodox Jews — the Magens are descended from a Jewish community that has been in Persia since approximately the eighth century BCE — Jian Magen donned a singlet and put an aging, bearded rabbi through a table. Joey Janela later told me that of all the warped angles he’d seen in his corner of the indie world, that ranked among the funniest.
Because of their father’s connection to the Sheik, the Magen twins loved wrestling since early childhood. When the WWF was in Toronto, the Sheik and his tag team partner, Nikolai Volkoff, would go to their house for Persian meals. The boys attended most of the shows at Maple Leaf Gardens, even standing at reverent attention when the Sheik attempted to draw heat by playing the “Imperial Anthem of Iran,” recited during the days of the Shah:
Long live our King of Kings
And may his glory immortalize our land
For Pahlavi improved Iran
A hundredfold from where it once used to stand
At Thornlea Secondary School, the pair was always putting on impromptu matches in hallways. “We’d be walking around with garbage cans and hitting each other with chairs in the middle of the day,” Jian said. “It was out of control. But we were drawing. The kids wanted to see it.”
One day, while waiting for the bus home, the brothers spotted a poster for an indie show featuring a number of former WWF stars. When they arrived at the event, though, they were stunned to be part of a crowd that numbered no more than 50. On the weekends, the pair was pulling more than 10 times as many teens to their all-ages deejay events, all with some kind of underlying wrestling theme.
“We called our company ‘Suck It Productions,’” Jian said, evoking DeGeneration X’s catchphrase during the WWF’s Attitude Era. “We’d do wrestling-style fliers. If a deejay was named Eric B, we’d call him Eric “Koko” B,” after future WWE Hall of Famer Koko B. Ware.
Occasionally, the Magens turned up at a rival school, taunting some kid as he left for the day. A crowd would gather, anticipating a fight. If a teacher intervened, the twins cursed him out. Then the twins — and the kid they seemed to be mocking — would reach into their bags and pull out fliers, inviting everybody to an upcoming event. “He was part of the act,” Jian boasted. “People went crazy. It was like the Carolinas in the ’70s, with Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat on top.”
Convinced that they could create the same excitement as wrestling promoters, the Magens had gathered phone numbers at the poorly attended indie show. “We were looking for ring crew guys, someone to rent us a ring, people who knew Rick Martel and Jimmy Snuka and other wrestlers we might want to work with.”
When the WWF ran its Breakdown: In Your House pay-per-view in 1998, the two drove to Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, hoping to widen their circle. Before they left the parking lot, they spotted two kids they recognized from a bar mitzvah party the brothers had organized the night before. “None of us had tickets,” Jian said. “We went over and promised to get everyone in. I knew the mother, and she was just happy to unload the kids for a few hours. She gave us money to scalp tickets and buy snacks.”
Jian and Page began testing the arena’s doors, seeing if anything would open. Eventually, one portal did, and the brothers led the adolescents into the building. After purchasing the kids some t-shirts, the pair struck up a conversation with a WWF employee. “He said they needed seat fillers for the first section. Anytime someone stood up during the show, they put us in their seats, so the arena always looked full on TV.”
When the fans returned, the Magens and the bar mitzvah kids hung off to the side, as the WWF employee imparted the lessons he’d obviously heard from someone else. “You hear those boos?” he asked during one match. “There’s money behind those boos. Vince is going to take that kid and turn him into the biggest babyface there ever was because he can hear the money.”
“Hey,” Jian ventured. “If we were doing our own show, how much would it cost to get, I don’t know — like a Tito Santana or King Kong Bundy?”
“What do you need them for? You’ve got Edge, Christian, Val Venis and Trish Stratus all in Toronto. They do outside appearances all the time. I’ll give you the number for talent relations. Here’s my card. Tell them you spoke to me.”
Then, to the brothers’ astonishment, the employee apologized for monopolizing the twins’ night out and took them into the dressing room area, where they saw people like Triple H, Mankind and The Rock stretching, chatting and commenting on the matches. Recalled Jian, “The bar mitzvah kids were going out of their minds.”
Ultimately, 1,500 fans turned up to the Magens’ show to see a main event pitting Edge against Andrew “Test” Martin at the Garnet A. Williams Community Centre in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill. In the semifinal, the Magen twins wrestled each other. “We brawled all over the building,” Jian said, “until my mother — unscripted — ran out to the ring and told us to stop.”
The referee ruled the finish a double-DQ.
Most of the rest of the card consisted of local talent hired by a woman the pair had met at the sparse indie show. “She gave us this list of how much everything would cost: $250 for the ref, $400 for this wrestler, $350 for that wrestler. Years later, we found out she was paying the guys something like $20 each. But we didn’t know. We even tipped her $2,500 because we thought she was a saint.”
In college — Jian attended York University and Page went to Dawson College, just like SeXXXy Eddy and PCP Crazy Fuckin’ Manny — the pair learned that every school had an entertainment budget and, for an agreed-upon fee, the brothers could stage wrestling events, largely featuring the WWF talent they idolized in the ’80s. “By then, we knew what things really cost,” Jian said.
In addition to the university circuit, the Magens began putting on cards at birthday parties, shopping malls and trade shows. They also built their business arranging deejays, musicians and dancers to perform at weddings and bar mitzvah parties. Sometimes, they’d give away tickets to their wrestling shows as prizes to the bar mitzvah attendees. When the youngsters showed up with their parents, the crowd would be reminded that, if anyone in Toronto were having a bar mitzvah, Magen Boys Entertainment was the way to go.
Initially, the pair’s wrestling company was called the Twin Tower Wrestling Federation, featuring a logo of the Twin Towers in the center of a target. Shortly after the real Twin Towers collapsed in 2001, the Iron Sheik was passing through Canadian customs, wearing his signature kaffiyeh. When a border service agent asked the purpose of his visit, he replied, belligerently, in his Iranian accent, that he was working for the Twin Tower Wrestling Federation.
The Magens knew it was time to change the company’s name.
The group expanded, running cards outside the Toronto area, renting rings locally and using area wrestlers. At a show in Thunder Bay, the pair used a contingent of Winnipeg performers, including Kenny Omega, and worked with a promoter familiar with the lakeside city. “I was asked to go to his hotel room for a meeting,” Jian said, “and he began trying to shake me down for money we didn’t agree to. Every time I’d mention the fee his contact had given us, the guy would say, ‘He was wrong.’ Finally, he opened up his briefcase and showed me his gun. So I paid him. When I did, he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you ever come back to Thunder Bay again.’”
It’s a refrain that the brothers continue to use. If one makes a mistake, the other says, “Don’t you ever come back to Thunder Bay again.”
Still, the incident changed something for the Magens. Everything had been so much fun until this point that the brothers were able to ignore the fact that wrestling could be a dodgy business. “There were lots of lessons learned,” Jian noted. “They were harsh lessons.”
During the summers, the brothers would split up and run dual shows on the same day at different summer camps, then drive through the night to the next venue. During one of these trips, Page Magen had his back broken in a car accident that killed the driver. Another time, “a very careless hardcore wrestler smashed a dirty ladder into my friend’s temple, and he was bleeding so much, I thought he was going to die,” Jian said.
After another card, the profits disappeared. “We were pretty sure one of the boys took it,” Jian said. “So we started to slow down and concentrate more on our other business. But the truth is that once you’re in it, wrestling never leaves you. It’s such a great life, even after things go wrong. I can remember just laughing while walking out of a club party with Billy Gunn and Brutus Beefcake in their gimmicks. We did comedy roasts with the Iron Sheik. We had famous wrestlers crash weddings. I helped John Morrison produce a wrestling horror film. When Impact Wrestling came to Toronto, I was used as a backstage interviewer and got involved in an angle where someone got thrown in a pool.”
In 2019, he reflected on how much wrestling had occupied his thoughts during his 40 years on earth. “Wrestling’s just so tied into everything. Who knows what else we’re going to do? We’re certainly not done yet. We might just be getting started.”