One of my favourite things about wrestling is it starts at different places for different people. Everyone has such a radically different entry point. Maybe it was someone who raised you that instilled a love for it. Maybe it was an older brother who performed spectacular maneuvers on you (shout out, Kelly!) Maybe it was a friend at school who introduced you to it. Or maybe you were just flipping through the channels one day and got captivated by the image of a monster. “My first go was just flicking through channels as a kid and I remember something to do with The Great Khali. I was like, 'Wow, that’s crazy.'” That's how it started for Judas Icraus, one of the most unique, hard-hitting and fast-rising wrestlers not just on the West Coast, but in Canada as a whole. The Great Khali. As I write this, I'm having a hard time thinking of two more different wrestlers than Judas Icarus and The Great Khali, but really, isn't that what makes this wrestling thing so special? There's room for everyone – performer or fan. Everyone can belong.

But we don't exist on an island and we gotta have people who support our interests or get weirdly into them with us. And thankfully for everyone in the PNW (and quickly beyond) who likes wrestling now, the man known as Judas Icarus found himself in an environment where his experience seeing The Great Khali could germinate and grow into, quite frankly, a fucking awesome young wrestling career. “Then my mom, for Easter, which was crazy, because my mom never got me a present for Easter, but she got me a triple-pack of figures – Triple H, Batista and Randy Orton. Awesome. And I got into wrestling figures.” Icarus tells me in his shockingly soft-spoken out-of-the-ring voice. (His in-ring voice – and uhhh sounds? – is hard, rough, and kinda scary.) “Then I met a friend, my longest friend that I still have, who was really into wrestling figures. He was a huge Jeff Hardy guy. We bonded over it. Played Smackdown vs Raw all the time. Then we met more friends in elementary and high school that were really into it. Then we started doing backyard wrestling a bit, had a backyard fed. We had a trampoline fed. We had entrances. We had full episodes, full seasons. We ran in it pretty well into the depths of high school.”