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"

February 05, 2026 by Blake Morneau in 5 Questions With Rags

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.”

5 Questions with Rags #44 - Ben Caplan (& The Casual Smokers)

February 07, 2017 by Blake Morneau in 5 Questions With Rags

There isn't a voice in Canadian like music like Ben Caplan. The deep, gravel-voiced leader of Ben Caplan & The Casual Smokers is a captivating talent, writing intelligent, interesting songs and delivering them with an intense passion and formidable talent. His songs are at once modern and timeless, covering love and life, good and evil, light and dark with eloquent nimbleness. I caught up with the mysterious man from the Maritimes as he and The Casual Smokers prepare to embark on a 33-date North American tour that sees the band go coast to coast across the Great White North and dipping down over the border to help ease the minds of our southern neighbours during troubling times.

1. Do you remember the first album you bought with your own money?

I do. It was a tape, I bought Pink Floyd's Relics.

Wow, that's not usually the first Pink Floyd record people pick up.

<laughs> It was a weird one, yeah. I had an older brother who was really into Pink Floyd. I wanted to make him think I was cool by finding a tape that he didn't have.

And did it work?

I don't know. Probably not. But I got into it.

2. Speaking as an older brother, you're right, it probably didn't. When is the last time you did something for the first time?

Probably last week, but I can't tell you what it is.

A secret project?! Oooh la la.

Haha. I'll tell you what, here's another one...I went to the Banff Centre for the first time about a month ago to do some work on a theatre project that I'm building. I'm working with actors and musicians on a theatre project I'm writing and I've never done that before. That was a big first for me. I think there's eight of us in total – four musicians, two actors, a director and another writer. It's been an interesting project.

5 Questions With Rags #1: Dan Bern

October 14, 2014 by Blake Morneau in 5 Questions With Rags

Not only am I proud to say that Bern is the first entry into this new (hopefully ongoing) series, Five Questions With Blake, I am overjoyed to say that Bern himself actually helped CONCEIVE this idea in the dark of Hermann’s Jazz Club in my hometown of Victoria, BC, after his show on October 3. The questions come from myself and four other fans that I spent the evening with, including my good friend and screenwriting guy Ben Rollo. In future I'm hoping to include not just musicians, but people from all walks of life and disciplines who might have some interesting things to say. But for now we start where everything seems to start for me, music. So, without further ado, I give you the first of this simple little thing that I hope is going be around a little while.

(Note: This was conceived and executed in the most impromptu of manners. I did not have a recording device of any kind, just a notepad and pen culled from other members of the group. I pieced this back together from hastily and terribly written notes.)"