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 #89 - Rashad Tyson or "I'm tryin' to be what I'm destined to be"

June 11, 2025 by Blake Morneau in 5 Questions With Rags

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.

5 Questions with Rags #43 - Immerze

January 28, 2017 by Blake Morneau in 5 Questions With Rags

An immense talent for the art of rapping combined with a seemingly endless well of hustle has helped Toronto-to-Vancouver transplant Immerze has established himself as one of Canada's most consistent and exciting Mcs in a surprisingly short time. A grimy, big-city east-coast feel gives his tracks a reliable bottom end with a defined west-coast lightness and positivity colouring everything, splitting the difference between the two aesthetics. It's getting trickier and trickier for to bond over hip-hop with younger, burgeoning heads but Immerze gives us a fertile common ground to start from. His trap-heavy beats are tuned for a younger ear, but the positive, family-man-gangsta lyrics are perfect for the uhhh older heads among us. There's an edge, but it's not sinister. It's a delicate balancing act that Immerze pulls off perfectly. I caught him on the phone from home in Vancouver to answer our silly questions for a smoky, bottom-heavy instalments of 5 Questions with Rags.

Keeping up with that track record of consistency, Immerze just released the new video for new single “2 Cents/Black Bond.” It's dope. Get after it.

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

Yep! 5O Cent Get Rich Or Die Tryin'. I think I bought like five of those albums. <laughs> Realistically though I bought four or five. If it wasn't in the car I was in, I would buy just so it was there. That album was religion when it came out.

What's your favourite track on there? You can only pick one..

Oh man...So many... “Many Men,” that one was on repeat heavy. Hmmm, there's so many. That album's a classic. Yeah, we'll stick with “Many Men.”

When's the last time you listened to it?

The album it its entirety? Probably about a year ago.

Do you find you get much time to listen to full albums anymore?

I always try to find time. If a new album comes out and I know I don't have time to listen to it in its entirety, I won't listen to it. Whether it's late at night or early in the morning, I'll find time. It's hard to do. You really gotta be a fan to do that. You're not doing that just skimming through. Albums that came out, like the Anderson .Paak album, I knew I wanted to be fully attentive when I listened to that, so I waited until a month or two after it came out. Then I can form my own opinion without the hype. An artist spends time making an album, so when you listen to it, at least give them the respect of listening to it yourself. Especially albums. Albums are usually pieces of a person's life. They're putting their life on wax for you to enjoy. So, to it's just shit while skimming through some tracks, that's real disrespectful.

2. What's your most positive memory of an elementary or high school teacher?

My guidance counsellor. He smoked weed every day. He would call me out of class, make it seem like we had a meeting and he'd tell me some funny-ass stories and he'd be like, “I'm fucking high bro. Don't tell anybody.” He was cool and didn't give a fuck. I though, “If all teachers were like this kids would actually want to come to school.”