5 Questions with Rags #93 - Sawyer Stein & Johnny Rostyn (Moment of Truth) or "Got my thinking cap on, now I'm sharp as a blade, don't believe me, you sit there and watch me get paid"

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Sometimes you're a loner and you're kinda forced to find something like pro wrestling, so you don't feel so alone and weird in the world. I think I kinda fell into that category. Sometimes being a wrestling fan is just in your blood. It gets passed down to you like some weird family heirloom to compels you to get into a ring and hurt yourself. “When I was a kid, my dad and my older brother used to watch Hulk Hogan, Macho Man and Roddy Piper. As I got older, it was Attitude Era – Rock and Stone Cold days. Then from there all my friends stopped watching and I was a closet wrestling fan until I started actually wrestling,” Rostyn tells me with a laugh, shortly before the doors open at the First Met Hall in Victoria for another big Friday night 365 Pro Wrestling show. “They all stopped when Cena, Lesnar came in. But I kept watching. Then I got really into New Japan. Until like 2020, I would still be watching on my phone at 4 in the morning, by myself, under a blanket. I’d go to talk about wrestling with my friends and they’d be like 'Dude, we don’t care.' But now all those dudes that ‘don’t care’ are like, “How’s wrestling?” Screw you guys!”

And sometimes, you grow up watching, like the second guy but you are also a talented multi-sport athlete that needed somewhere to put your energy, so you do the thing that you shared with your dad. “Sawyer: For me, I watched wrestling with my dad growing up, since I was like three years old. Wouldn’t miss an episode RAW, Smackdown!, Sunday Night Heat, Velocity.” This motherfucker Sawyer said VELOCITY. I am shocked. That is dedication from the start. “Dude, we watched it all. And TNA!” Like his homie Rostyn, Saywer Stein is a student of the game.

“I played pretty much every sport growing up and had a good little character of my own in whatever sport I was playing that weekend. I was a shit-disturber, a natural heel on and off the court. It translated really well. I was always thinking about doing wrestling. I wasn’t really sure of when or how or where I was gonna do it,” Sawyer recalls during our sit down. Lucky for everyone in 365 Nation, fate didn't let him get settled in any of those other things. “I was literally about to take an offer to be a multi-sport athlete at a university that was by the Pro Wrestling Academy, where it was before in Campbell River. Then I went to a show, it was PWA at the time, before 365 changed their brand. Eddie had brought it in Carlito for a week and I watched their show at the Edelweiss Club. I was always a huge Carlito mark so that fired me up. That show, that day, they announced they were opening a school in Victoria. So…Now I’m here.”

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5 Questions with Rags #92 - Liiza Hall or "Feeling like I run this whole block...Tryna scratch my way to the top"

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On November 15, 365 Pro Wrestling held the inaugural Queen of the Island Tournament in Victoria. It was a landmark evening, featuring 11 women's wrestlers – including the 8 that made up the tournament bracket. When that bracket originally dropped, consensus among the 365 faithful (at least the ones I talk to!) all chose Liiza Hall as the winner. It seemed obvious to us. So, you can imagine our surprise when she lost in first round, albeit after a genuinely incredible match, to relatively unknown Cherry Blossom. Hall came out to cheers, but as the match progressed, we could see the terrifying bully Liiza, the one that it's cemented in all of our heads as a KILLER, come out more and more. When Blossom got the 1-2-3 and the victory, the jammed-packed crowd erupted in joy at the surprise triumph. Cherry Blossom established herself as someone not to fuck with, because everyone who regularly attends 365, and really any indie wrestling company in the PNW, knows that Liiza Hall is not someone to be fucked with. So bright is her star and strong is her ability in the ring, that getting a win over her is a huge step for anyone coming up in the scene.

Hall has been at the forefront of a quiet revolution of women's wrestling on the Canadian west coast. It's a scene that is genuinely on fire and growing at a rapid pace, with tournaments like the 365's Queen of the Island and BOOM! Pro Wrestling's Coco Harriet Invitational putting the spotlight where it belongs. It's a big change from when Hall first stepped into the scene herself. “It's really nice to see how much it's grown in the last 10 years. When I first started wrestling there was probably the same three or four ladies all the time,” reflects Hall, taking valuable time away from her new kitten, Frankie, to talk on an idle Thursday afternoon. “Now I get to wrestle the new trainees from Lion's Gate. I get to wrestle a bunch of people from Portland and Washington. Even here, we have, it might sound like a small number, but even having five or six women who are consistently wrestling in one area is a big deal. It's nice to see more women trying to get into the sport. I love it.”

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5 Questions with Rags #91 - The Flamin' Aces (Zaye Perez & Spencer Scott) or "Blow out your candles, make a wish, What's a life if you never take a risk?"

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In less than five years of existence, The Flamin' Aces – “Playboy” Zaye Perez and “Hot Shot” Spencer Scott – have set the PNW tag team wrestling scene on fire, establishing themselves as one of the most sought after pairings the region has to offer. In a tag team scene that is jam-packed with talent and charisma, setting yourself apart isn't an easy task, but it's something The Flamin' Aces have accomplished in town after town. I was in the building when they debuted for 365 in Victoria – a city with a crowd with little knowledge of indie wrestling outside of their home promotion(s). When Perez and Scott came out from behind the curtain, it took the 365 crowd about a half-trip around the ring to turn into absolute lunatics for the Flamin' Aces. Cheers, claps, shrieks; the Aces brought it out of us before they even stepped into the ring. Once they got between the ropes, The Flamin' Aces backed up the hype, flipping and diving around the ring like maniacs, while also beautifully executing non-flipping wrestling maneuvers (important!). Their in-ring heroics and magnetic personalities have made Perez and Scott favourites on the Canadian west coast, an area that has embraced them and welcomed them from day one. The duo has been frequent guests here on the Canadian west coast working in all of the dopest promotions including 365, BOOM! Invoke, NEW and Wrestlecore.

Earlier this year, Rags Music caught up with Zaye and Scott before their summer trip to Vancouver where they won, and probably broke, hearts at Invoke and Pride Style's “To Love and Lariat.” In all fairness, we did catch up for a piece for Invoke Pro Wrestling – which is still forthcoming, so keep your eyes peeled for the deep wrestling nerd stuff with that one – but we couldn't pass up the opportunity to get one of our favourite tag teams to answer the 5 Questions. Thankfully, they were game for questions about first albums (however embarrassing), mentors and having a good cry. So, dive in and get to know some things about your new favourite tag team, the Flamin' Aces.

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5 Questions with Rags #90 - Eddie Osbourne or "Throw fo' fingers up, add a thumb, then make it a fist, Number one draft pick, lead the league in assists"

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If you go to a 365 show now – here on the west coast or out in Ontario where the company also runs sold out shows – it is packed with people seemingly rabid for 365's brand of wrestling. But, of course, what happens currently is just the tip of iceberg, and doesn't happen without all the hard work underneath that no one really sees. “I went in with no knowledge. I had mentors that were wrestlers, but no promoter that took me under their wing to help me out. There was no one to really study and learn from. It was just a bunch of wrestlers trying to figure out how to make this thing work. It was hard to get people in seats. Learning how to get those posters out there, who to talk to about radio, etc. I didn’t know what to do. It was challenging to be the boss of something.” But in the challenges, there's always sprouts of something good to keep you going. “The surprising part was just how much people want to work to help you with getting bigger and better and GROW. I’ve never done PWA or 365 on my own. I’ve had such a community and people behind me. It wouldn’t be here without them. There’s so many of them. There’s phases – sometimes they come and go, sometimes they’re here forever. I’ve had some guys with me since the beginning.”

Osbourne officially had his first match on September 15, 2001. As he approaches a quarter century of wrestling, he's quick to answer when I ask him what keeps him going. “I love it. It’s fun. If it wasn’t fun, I’d quit. If I wasn’t having a good time, I’d leave. There things to learn all of the time, because it’s always changing” This is man who just really fucking loves wrestling, who has grown with wrestling and is always thinking about wrestling. “Wrestling, from when I started to now, is so different, but it’s also so much the same. The goal is the same now, to get the reaction, but the way we do it might be different now. I used to be in faces, trying to start fights, saying some stuff that makes me go 'Oi!' Now it’s maybe a little more tame but also all the fans are here, not as wrestling fans always, but people who want to come out and get away from the world.”

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5 Questions with Rags #89 - Rashad Tyson or "I'm tryin' to be what I'm destined to be"

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When I first started interviewing wrestlers, I had the assumption that you could detect and guess someone's original wrestling inspiration(s) by simply watching them in the ring. Little movements, bits of movesets, etc., I genuinely (and incorrectly) believed this formula meant something. As this hypothesis is being disproven more and more all the time, no one has surprised me with their long-running favourite like Rashad Tyson. “My favourite wrestler I first knew I liked, and specifically thought, 'I'm gonna follow this guy's journey,' was Randy Orton. Specifically bald Legacy Randy Orton.,” Tyson says, shocking me on an idle Friday morning. (If I was drinking coffee I would have spat it out hilariously.) “The whole angle was so entertaining to me growing up. Just his stare alone was the wildest thing. I love a good bad guy. The best bad guys to me are built out of trauma and like, Randy Orton's whole story about his anger issues, 'Don't push me to the edge' and that. I don't wanna resonate with this, but I think it's kinda cool.” Randy Orton. This man, Rashad Tyson – this man I declared my new favourite wrestler on Instagram after seeing him live for literally 3 minutes because of the love I could feel pouring from every corner of the room – came up loving one of the most evil mufuckas to grace a wrestling ring?? How could this be? But if you stop to think even for a moment, it makes perfect sense. Wrestling is about reactions and connections. It's one of the few places where Horseshoe Theory actually applies. Orton connects to the lizard brains of the audience, Rashad connects to their hearts. In the end, it's really the same thing. And there aren't a lot of wrestlers in the Pacific Northwest that are making those connections with the audience like Real Talk Rashad Tyson.

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