Brewsers #300- Marek Brave with Black and BraveWrestling Academy

Today on Brewsers, we talk to Marek Brave with Black and BraveWrestling Academy. We talk about his journey into pro wrestling, Black and Brave Wrestling Academy. and so much more. Follow us on instagram and twitter at Brewserspod. Like, share, review, enjoy and cheers. #brewsers #brewserspod #Enjoylife #DrinkLocal #Cheers 



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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Welcome to Bruisers podcast about beer, Coffee, Booze and Bruisers.
I am your host, Fray John, and today we talked
to Merrick Brave with Black and Brave Wrestling Academy. We
talked about his journey into pro wrestling, Black and Brave
Wrestling Academy and so much more. This is such a
fun conversation and a milestone episode is our three hundreds
episode and I can't wait for you guys to get
right into it. So without further ado, here is Merrick

(00:42):
Brave with Black and Brave Wrestling Academy. I would like
to welcome show Americ Brave with Black and Brave. How
are you doing today, sir?

Speaker 2 (01:03):
I'm doing well. How are you doing?

Speaker 1 (01:05):
I'm doing well, So for those listeners, kind of paint
us a word picture, where yet what's going on around you?

Speaker 2 (01:12):
I am freshly woken up from a nap. We had
an event last night with the independent promotion that I run.
It's called SCW Pro here in the Quad Cities Eastern Iowa,
Western Illinois. We had an event at a minor league
hockey game last night which starts after the hockey game's over,
so it didn't start until about nine thirty at night,

(01:33):
got out of there probably eleven forty five or so,
and uh, I'm just an old man now. It's too
late for me to be staying up. So I got
myself a nice long nap on this Saturday afternoon, but
made sure I woke up in time so I could
chat with you.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
I appreciate you waking up just for me. That's very nice.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Well, you're welcome.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
What does naps look like? What is a What is
a nap for you?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:57):
For me, like, twenty minutes is good, even though you know,
obviously I think I've gone to like two or three
hours before. What's a good nap for you?

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah, I'm kind of new to the whole nap thing. Obviously.
When I was younger, I was a napper, But in
my adult life, I've just been kind of go go
go all the time, you know, running multiple businesses, and
I wasn't necessarily anti nap, but I just didn't really
know how to slow down and give myself the rest
I need. So this has been more of a In

(02:27):
the last two to three months, I've been more of
a napper. But yeah, like you said, it can range
from a twenty minute nap all the way to today.
It was a two and a half hour nap, which
I'm not even sure if that's just a nap anymore,
or did I just fall asleep, like was that just
an extra sleep? I'm not sure, but yeah, twenty minutes
is just fine on an afternoon when I've got some

(02:51):
things going on in the evening. But today I decided
to give myself the full on nap experience.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
I understand the aspect of not being able to slow down,
and so that way the nap can exist because you
don't have time for it or you don't make time
for it. Yeah, yeah, it is hard sometimes just to go, go, go,
but you know, as long as you're still moving, it's
a good thing. Once you do slow down, that's when
it's all like, oh, the tiredness has hit.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, And you know, like I always use the rationale
that you only get one life to live, so you
might as well live it and not spend it trying
to avoid busyness or uncomfortability, Like, let's embrace all that,
But lately I've also been embracing the naps. So it's
about balance exactly.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Life is about balance, and at the end of the day,
that's really all it is about.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
M M.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Well, let's go all the way back in time. What
is your earliest memory of pro wrestling?

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Oh, that's funny. My earliest memory of pro wrestling, and
this would have been years before I would have considered
myself a fan. I remember, oh, either late eighties or
very early nineties, a Saturday night, probably my my mom
flipping through the channels, and uh, she landed on wrestling

(04:10):
and for some reason she wanted to stop and keep
that on. And I wasn't watching it super intently, but
I remember seeing Hull Cogan, Jake the Snake, Roberts, and uh,
just thinking like, oh, this is this is this is odd,
this is strange, this is nothing like anything I've ever
seen before. And and uh it wouldn't be until oh,

(04:32):
probably two three four years later where I really became
a diehard wrestling fan and that that stuck for the
rest of my life. But I just have these fleeting
memories of myself as a very young child seeing those
those two guys in particular on my TV screen, and
it created a lasting memory.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
I mean they even to this day. I mean obviously
right p Hul Cogan, but they're still you know, in
their later years, still very much the same characters that
they were in the eighties and nineties, just you know,
obviously older.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Oh yeah, timeless, timeless. When you when you find something
like they did that works as well as those characters did,
you stick with it and you make your money. So
they were able to do that well.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
As a kid from Iowa, how was it that you
ended up deciding, you know what I want to be out,
that's what I want to do? Like how do I
get into that?

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah? So actually I was born in New Hampshire, moved
around a lot as a little kid. Became a wrestling
fan when I was living in Kansas, but then did
eventually move to the Quad City's Bettendorf, Iowa, directly next
to Davenport, Iowa, in nineteen ninety seven, and just a

(05:48):
few years later, this would have been two thousand and two,
me and my group of friends from high school, we
decided we wanted to sleep overnight at the venue to
get some tickets for using that was coming to town,
and it just so happened that that night I ran
into my future Tag team partner, business partner, and great friend,

(06:10):
Seth Rollins. When he was just a sixteen year old kid,
and we hung out all night long, and you know,
his group of friends, they were outside waiting for tickets
as well. They were doing some backyard wrestling on the
lawn outside of the arena, which was actually coincidentally where
my event took place last night, was at this vibrant arena.

(06:31):
We had an event in a ballroom there after the hockey.
So yeah, we were like, hey, these guys seem really cool.
Let's let's be friends with these guys. And little did
I know that that would become one of the most
important days of my life, you know, meeting my future
tag team partner, you know, good friend and now business
partner in the Black and Brave Wrestling Academy. Yeah, I'm

(06:54):
not sure where I'd be as a human being or
an individual without that. But after meeting him, and he
was so passionate about becoming a pro wrestler, and I
never thought that that was going to be the path
I was going to take. But as I was graduating
high school and I had I had started wrestling professionally
during my entire senior year of high school, I was like, well,

(07:15):
I don't really know what else I'm going to do,
and and uh, I'm pretty solid at this wrestling thing
and I like it a lot. And it wasn't for
a lack of passion, right that I didn't think I
was going to be a professional wrestler. I just didn't
think it was a realistic goal or or something that
that could be attained. And uh, you know, going to
independent shows at that time, we learned about wrestling schools

(07:37):
and how people broke into the business, and after high
school we just said, screw it, let's let's do that.
Let's let's go be pro wrestlers. Let's try and figure
out how to make this, uh, make this a career.
And thankfully, through a very secuitous route that has, uh
that has happened for me, and now I make my
living almost strictly off of pro wrestling. So very blessed

(07:57):
in that regard.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
When you had these thoughts of, well, is that really
something that you can actually, you know, do for a living.
Was that something people were putting in your head or
was that something that you were looking at and you're like,
how do you make money just doing this?

Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah? I don't think it just wasn't very common back then.
We broke into the business in two thousand.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
And three, yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
And it just wasn't very common for people to come
from independent wrestling and make a living off of pro
wrestling in major companies like WWE. The path hadn't been
forged yet. You know, this was prior to Cmpunk doing
it and prior to Matt Seidel doing it and people
like that, and so it just it was like a, well,

(08:42):
you know, we could keep doing this independent wrestling thing,
but can you really make a living doing independent wrestling?
And then you know, we found places like a Ring
of Honor. Oh, okay, so you can make a living.
If you get a contract with Ring of Honor, you
can make a decent living and you don't have to
make it all the way to WWE. And so it
was just like, you know what, I really enjoyed doing this.
It's really fun doing this. At the time, I was

(09:06):
dating a girl who was a year older than me,
so my senior year in high school. She was at
the University of Iowa, which is where I was supposed
to go as well, and we had to plan this
whole thing out about how I would move there and
we'd get an apartment together and you know, basically start
our adult lives together. And as I was nearing graduation,
I realized that it's not what I want to do,

(09:26):
and I didn't want to go to college directly after
high school, and I wanted to keep pursuing this wrestling thing.
So although it felt like something that ultimately would be
very difficult to achieve, if not impossible to achieve, it
was something that I had to I had to go
for just because I had such a love for it.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
How cool were you as a senior? You were dating
a college girl and a pro wrestler at the same time, Like, come.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
On, yeah, no, not cool at all. Wrestling. Wrestling wasn't
cool then. That's why my students will ask me now, like, oh, man,
you you wrestled when you were in high school. I
bet everybody thought you were the coolest. I'm like, no,
quite the opposite. We would we would hand out flyers
during the lunch period to the shows that we were having,
and I mean classic, you know, high school movie kids

(10:15):
would just crumple the flyers up immediately in front of
our faces and throw them in the garbage if not
on the floor, and we were like, oh, okay, cool,
thanks for that, but yeah, not wrestling had had its
boon in the late nineties and I graduated in two
thousand and four, so by the time I became a
pro wrestler, it was no longer cool to be a

(10:37):
pro wrestler. But also nobody knew what independent wrestling was.
You know, this was before this was pre YouTube days,
pre streaming days. To try to explain to somebody what
independent wrestling was, they just didn't get it. And here
in Davenport, Iowa, there's a big MMA contingent. Yeah, a

(10:58):
lot of popular MMA guys had come from here, and
so when we would tell people about the indie wrestling
that we were doing, they just assumed it was MMA,
and we just had to keep explaining to them, no, no, no,
it's it's it's pro wrestling, like Hulkogan, the Rock Stone Cold,
Steve Auston like those guys. And then people would just
be disgusted, like what do you mean, like that, that's

(11:21):
the fake stuff you should go do the mm A. Yeah,
we're like no, no, no, we don't want to get punched
for real.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Well kind of paint is a word pictures. I mean,
I graduated oh one, and I know, you know, WWE
bought w CW, a ECW and basically level the whole
wrestling world where it was just them, and like you
were saying, the independents weren't as pop as prevalent as

(11:47):
they would be obviously now. But I mean, and even
at that point, TNA had kind of just started, but
not really so kind of tell us how, you know,
for those that either weren't alive or weren't paying tension
as much. What the really the landscape of the pro
wrestling world was around the time, like you said, you
were actually getting into it.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, I mean, it was WWE and then everybody else.
The Ring of Honor had kind of just just started
up and they were gaining some traction, and we would
illegally download some clips off of Kazah. I remember downloading, yeah,
low Key versus Amazing Red from one of the East

(12:28):
Coast promotions. They you know, they kind of took it
around the whole East Coast back then, and I remember
taking forever to download, you know, just a ten second clip,
and then eventually we found a full match and that
was like a full day's worth of downloading. But but
we watched it, we were like, what is this. This
is not like the WWE. This is completely different. These

(12:50):
are people that are closer to our size, moving much
faster than the guys in wwee doing. You know, at
the time, probably thought it was like matrix style or
Kung Fu movie style wrestling, you know, John Wick eventually
when John Wick would be created. But you know, we
just we immediately gravitated towards that and said, oh, you know,

(13:13):
I can't relate to somebody the size of the rock,
you know, like I'll I'm and now even as a
thirty nine year old man, I'm six foot two, two
hundred pounds. Back then, I was probably five ten, one
hundred and sixty pounds, you know, like there was just
no there's no one in WWE that I could relate

(13:34):
to on a size level like that. And so I just,
you know, it never occurred to me that anyone my
size could make a living off of pro wrestling. So
when I saw low Keen amazing Red, I was like, Okay,
I that's cool. I can do that. I can I
can I can do that style of wrestling. I could
be that style of wrestler. And and we my group

(13:56):
and I are, our group of friends, are our group
of you know, local wrestlers here. We had heard about
independent wrestling in Chicago. We're about two and a half
hours away from Chicago, through an old message boards called
Chicago Pro Wrestling message Board. You know, this was pre Facebook,
pre Twitter, all of that stuff. Social media wasn't a

(14:19):
thing yet. So we found it through a message board
and we found dates for independent shows in the Chicago area,
and we were like, why don't let's go. Let's go
to this. Maybe this will be like the the low key,
amazing red stuff. It wasn't, but you know, we got
our first look at at guys like see them Punk
and Colt Cabana and Jimmy Jacobs and you know, guys

(14:42):
like that and before they ever broke it big anywhere,
and they were good back then. So we saw that
and we were like, okay, indie wrestling School, I like
this stuff, you know, let's figure out how we can
get involved with that on a bigger scale, you know.
And that's that's when the wrestling school came in. All right,
we got to get trained properly if we're gonna if

(15:02):
we're gonna make this a thing, right.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
Well, so I know you had to retire from a
competition due to a neck injury, which I heard you
tell the story on another podcast, and it is it
sounds so gruesome. I don't want to see the video,
which I imagine a lot of people might if you
could walk us through, please what happened? And I want
to talk about things afterwards?

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Sure? Yeah. So unfortunately, this was pretty pretty early on
in my independent career. I started in August of two
thousand and three, and my injury happened in May of
two thousand and seven, so less than four years in.
And myself and Seth who was known as Tyler Black
at the time. That's where the tag team named Black

(15:49):
and the Brave came in. Very creative. I know, we
had actually gotten a tryout for Ring of Honor, so
you know, we were kind of we were inches away
from from this dream that we had had since we
had started of getting contracts with Ring of Honor. That
was our ultimate goal, you know, like this is this

(16:10):
is the the peak of the mountain here. If we
can get here, then we've made it. And we were
in a tag team match against the Briscoe Brothers down
in Florida. We actually drove up from Davenport up to
Chicago two and a half hours to pick up three

(16:31):
other guys and then we drove all the way down
to Tampa, Florida. Night one was in Tampa, I had
a singles match against Mark Briscoe, and Seth wrestled Jay
and then the very next night we challenged for the
f I P Tag Team titles, which we were told, hey,
this is your this is your trial match. You guys

(16:52):
do well here and you're gonna get contracts with Ring
of Honor. We're like, all right, cool, let's do this,
and unfortunately I was I was going for a reverse
r Kanarana on Jay and and instead of flipping over,
he made a bit of a mistake and fell on
top of me instead. But I was completely upside down
and so the my forehead made contact with the mat,

(17:13):
it completely folded me over to the point where the
back of my head was making contact in between my
shoulder blades. Looked like I was decapitated. Pretty gruesome, and
I tried to get up. I tried to continue the
match against the wishes of the promoter, one Gabe Sapolski,

(17:33):
and he came rushing down to the ring. He said, hey,
you stay here, We're getting you an ambulance. So they
called an ambulance, stretched me out of the ring took
me to the hospital. They that was just a kid
with with no health insurance, so they didn't give me
very good care, not not comprehensive care in the least,
and they didn't know that I had herniated two discs
in my neck and broken a vertebrae in my lower

(17:58):
back as well. So I went home home was pretty
immobile for about two weeks before I started just rehabbing
it on my own. And at that point, you know,
I had been wrestling multiple times a week, every single week,
you know, with the goal of getting a contract and
ring of honor, you know, making a living off of
independent wrestling. But I had to really scale back my schedule,

(18:19):
and also I had just lost a lot of love
for independent wrestling pro wrestling at the time, just because
of the injury I had suffered and how devastating it was.
And I had come to the realization that due to
this injury, you know, and I didn't know the extent
of it at the time, but I just knew it
felt awful, you know, due to the extent of the injury,
I wasn't going to be able to achieve the goal

(18:40):
of making a living off of professional wrestling. At least,
you know, as a professional wrestler. Later on, i'd be
able to do it as a trainer, which I'm doing
now again blessed to do that, but at the time
I was just so bitter and angry at the business
for taking my health away at such a young age.
I was twenty years old when that injury happened. I
wouldn't turn twenty one until the following month, and you know,

(19:02):
just less than four years in so I was pretty
upset about it, but didn't really know what else to
do to make money. So I continued to take limited
independent bookings, but it just wasn't the same. I had
to completely change my style, and I wasn't able to
work out at the time, and so you know, I
went from having like a bodybuilder's physique, albeit a small

(19:23):
bodybuilder's physique, to just not being able to work out
and not being able to go to the gym. And
it was just soul crushing in every way. So I
did eventually end up taking about a year year and
a half off to kind of get my mind right.
I also thought that I was probably done, but after
about a year and a half classic pro wrestling story,

(19:43):
I get the itch and so I get back in
shape and I come back, and at that point my
goals for what I wanted out of wrestling had changed.
I was doing it more so for the love of it.
I had, you know, refound my love for pro wrestling,
and that allowed me to put things in perspective and obviously,
honestly just put less pressure on myself. You know, I

(20:05):
wasn't trying to make it as this big, famous pro wrestler.
I just wanted to have fun with my friends, and
so I started doing that, and then shortly after the
wrestling school came to be. So it all kind of
worked out in the end, and again in a very
very strange way. But the injury itself was a very
scary and trying time of my life.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah, thank you for sharing that, because I know that
it's not something that you obviously want to relive. But
it in the long run worked out well for you
because unfortunately, you did get out of it for a
little while, and obviously the effect on your neck was
not good at all, But then you did find your
love for progrestling again. And I did want to talk about,
like when it was that down period where you were

(20:53):
just so not happy with the business because what it
did to you, and obviously everything that happened, what kind
kind of helped pull you through or pull you out
of it? Because you know, when athletes get that kind
of injury, no matter what sport they're playing or whatever
it is, they can get into a really dark hole.
And you know, unfortunately some of them, yes they come back,

(21:15):
but mentally they're not there, They're not the same person.
So what kind of things kind of helped you through
that time that you were You didn't just keep spiraling
and you actually did get yourselself out of it.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Yeah, you know, at that point I decided to just
kind of pursue other interests as a young man. I
was in my early twenties at the time, and I
did eventually get married during my time off or since divorce.
But we're really good friends still to this day, so
no issues there. But you know, my significant other helped

(21:48):
pull me through. And then also I've always been into music.
I started a band here in my hometown. We did
a little two week summer tour across the Midwest, which
was a good time, recorded an album. I realized this
is a lot harder than I thought it was going
to be. And I don't really have the time to
commit to this because I ended up going back to
school at the same time too. I ended up going

(22:10):
to college for the first time, so that plan just
got delayed by a few years. Yeah, I just kind
of kept myself busy with other things again, with wrestling
not involved. I didn't even watch wrestling at the time.
I wouldn't even put it on the TV. And this
was right around the time that Seth had gotten signed
to the Developmental Territory FCW, which would become NXT, and

(22:34):
so we would chat and talk about how he was
doing and whatnot. There wasn't any way to watch it
at that point. It wasn't like they were on TV
or anything. So he would just tell me how things
were going, and so I'd kind of stay I don't
want to say I stay involved in that way because
I didn't, like I said, I didn't watch it anything
like that, but you know, at least we were still

(22:55):
chatting here and there. And then one day I was
just sitting on the couch flipping through channels, didn't even
realize what day it was, what time it was, and
I happened to come across Monday night Raw and See
Them Punk was on the TV, and like I said,
I had known CM Punk for quite a long time.

(23:15):
We'd become friends on the independent scene, you know, not
we weren't hanging out or anything like that, but you know,
cordial and had some good conversations and we kind of
bonded over the fact that we enjoyed the same type
of music and whatnot. And so I saw him on
the TV and I was like, oh, let's I'll stop
on this first time in a long time. Let's see
what's going on with See Them Punk. Well, he took

(23:38):
took a seat cross legged on the on the entryway
there on the ramp, and that was the famous pipe
bomb promo and I was like, wow, okay, that was
awesome and and that kind of that kind of sucked
me back in. It was it was serendipitous to say,
but I was like, well, now I got to see
where this goes, what happens with this. So I just

(23:59):
started watching Monday Night Raw again and then all of
a sudden, Seth was sending me some matches that he
had had in FCW on YouTube and I watched him
and a young Dean Ambrose John Moxley in a match
I think it was two out of three falls, and
in my head I was kind of calling the spots
before they were doing them, like I was calling the

(24:20):
match in my own mind ahead of time, and then
they were acting it out in the ring, and I
was like, man, I think I still got a mind
for this pro wrestling thing. I just don't really have
the health or the body. I'm not in shape right now.
And I remember Seth coming home for Christmas break and
we went out for lunch and we were having a conversation.

(24:41):
I told him that story. How you know, I felt
like I still had a brain for it, but I
just didn't have the body, and in simple Seth fashion,
just he just looked at me and he said, so
get the body, go to the gym, get in shape,
and do this again if you still love it. And
I was like, well, I guess I just needed somebody
to put it to me in simplest in the simplest

(25:02):
way possible, and He's always good for that. So that's
when I decided to get back in shape and get
back into pro wrestling because I loved it and not
because I felt like I needed it for for any
you know, reason whatsoever. I just I just wanted to
do it again. I just I refound my love for wrestling.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
I love that. What well, then, where did the idea
for the school come from?

Speaker 2 (25:27):
I actually was training a handful of local kids here
in Davenport, Iowa, just people who had contacted me wanting to,
uh to find their way in independent wrestling. I would
say maybe like five kids or so, and uh, you know,
Seth would would message me, Hey, how's that, how's that

(25:47):
training stuff you're doing? How's it going? And we would
talk about it and I'd vent frustrations, you know, just
the classic I wasn't even an old guy yet, but
I had an old guy mentality. It just classic, Oh
these kids aren't working hard enough and YadA, YadA, YadA.
And he's like, well, i'll tell you what. Someday, when
I get signed to the main roster, I'm going to
move back to Iowa and we can start a wrestling

(26:08):
school together. And I was like, oh, yeah, it sounds great,
not thinking it would ever happen. You know, I'm thinking
it was one of those things that would be talked
about but never come to fruition. And sure enough, you know,
I'm watching Survivor series whatever year, it was and out
pops the shield and I was like, oh, cool, he's
on the main roster, still not really thinking about what

(26:29):
he had said. And then a few days later, I
was at work and I had gotten a text when
I was on my break, and I looked at it
and he's like, all right, I'm moving back to Iowa
in about a month and then we can sit down
and start making plans for that wrestling school. And I
was like, oh, all right, well, I guess we'll do this.
And yeah, he moved back home and we immediately started
getting the wheels in motion. I think we announced the class,

(26:51):
the first class in July of twenty fourteen, and we
had a full class and we began our training just
a month later. And it's been a it's been a
full time job since then, and it's been a wild ride,
but again something I'm very very thankful to be able
to do.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
I've had some of your students on the show and
they have absolutely come out and said nothing but glowing
things about how much they love the school. So obviously
you guys are doing something fantastic. Plus you've been open
for eleven years now, which is insane.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah, it is insane. It does feel unrealistic. If you
would have told if you'd have told little kid me
that one day I'd make a living off of pro wrestling,
he wouldn't have believed you. But then if you told
bitter old man me, who was suffering from a neck
injury from wrestling, that one day you'd make a living
off of pro wrestling, I probably would have just laughed

(27:45):
in your face. But here we are, like you said,
eleven years later, and you know, all of our twenty
twenty six classes are filled, half of our twenty twenty
seven classes are filled, and it just it just it
keeps on rolling. And just very thankful that we've built
this community of people who are as passionate about pro
wrestling as Seth and I were when we first started

(28:09):
in two thousand and three and still are now.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Now, is it true that the students have to work
at the coffee shop three nine two.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Deeple No not, It's not a requirement. A handful of
them have decided to get jobs over there, but I mean,
at the end of the day, it's just a job.
So they usually they're usually like, wait, what I thought
I was just going to get to talk about pro
wrestling all day. It's like, no, no, no, there's real
regular people there. There's civilians there, and they don't care

(28:37):
about wrestling at all. So yeah, got a requirement.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
The building's connected, right, like the coffee shop in the school.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, yep, yep, yep. We share a wall with them
and we can hear their easy listening music while they
hear our heavy metal music all day long.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
What is your go to order over there?

Speaker 2 (28:58):
I'll tell you what. I am A simple man. I
get a black Americano, just a very simple black Americana.
No cream, no sugar, just just give me the caffeine, baby,
iced or hot, either or depending on the weather, I'll
do an iced Americano in the summer and a hot
Americano now as it's starting to get chili.

Speaker 1 (29:19):
I was gonna say, you guys are probably far more
chillier than we are down here in Texas right now.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, we just our temperatures just cooled off last week.
We were in the upper fifties, low sixties every day,
and looking forward, it looks like we're dipping down into
the low fifties and then we'll have snow and ice
before you know it.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, we're getting Yeah, it's dipped down to the seventies eighties,
but it's also been raining the past two days, so
that helps things.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Well, I'm not a big fan of the winter weather,
so maybe someday I'll find myself living in the south.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Then how the hell are you still in Iowa? I
hear it so windy and so cold it is, Yeah,
it's it like goes to your bones.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Yeah. Well, I mean, I've made a nice little for
myself here in Iowa, so I'm not ready, not ready
to give that all up yet. And now I have
two sons, ones a freshman in high school, the other
ones in fourth grade, and they're you know, they're they're
my anchors, They're my rocks, and wherever they are, that's
where I'll be.

Speaker 1 (30:17):
I love that so much. Well, I mean, over the
ten years you have been training, what have been some
of your favorite memories so far?

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Gosh, I mean, I feel like every day is a
new favorite memory, you know, just getting to build the
relationships with these students and take them from oftentimes, plenty
of people that come to us they've never stepped foot
in a professional wrestling ring a single time in their life,
and we get to take them from their first steps
in a pro wrestling ring all the way up to

(30:45):
them having matches just twelve weeks later, and then we
get to send them out into the independent ranks and
watch them gain experience and kind of go through the
same things that Seth and I went through when we
first started. And it certainly an up and down journey.
You know, it's a wild ride. You're gonna have good days,
you're gonna have bad days, You're gonna have days in between.

(31:06):
And thankfully we get to you know, we get to
help them through those those highs and lows, and we
get to give them advice on how to deal with
these things. But every day is just kind of a new,
rewarding experience. And I love in particular, I love learning
about these guys and these girls. I like learning about

(31:26):
their backgrounds and where they come from. And you know,
I'm always asking questions about, hey, you know, what's your
favorite food? You know, especially our foreign students coming from
from different countries, like, hey, tell me about what it's
like where you live. And I'm learning about the world
through through our students who are coming from all over
the place, and it's just it really is a rewarding

(31:48):
job and It's not lost on me how blessed I
am to be able to do this for a living,
To be able to wear sweatpants to work while everybody
else suits and thighs, you know, to be happy to
listen to cool music and and and work alongside my
best friends like it. It's it's a really awesome gig

(32:08):
and very happy that that this is what I get
to wake up and do every single day.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
What are what's the uh what other countries out there
people come to help drain with you all over?

Speaker 2 (32:20):
I mean right now, we got a guy from England.
We've had plenty of people from Australia, New Zealand, the
United Arab Emirates, a lot of South American countries, Chile, Brazil,
places like that. We've had people from Poland and Germany

(32:40):
and just France all over all over our entire globe,
We've had people come through and it's just been really
cool to see them experience American culture for better or worse,
for the first time, and then also get to learn
about their cultures as well.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah, Iowa is definitely not like the rest of the America.
So how how do people How do people like Iowa?
Because I imagine they think when they think America, they probably
think of la or New York or you know, things
like even maybe even a beach or something. But nobody
really truly thinks about the middle of the country. So now,
how does that work out?

Speaker 2 (33:20):
The Midwest is certainly different than most of those places
you mentioned. Now. We are, like I said, two and
a half hours from Chicago, and a lot of our
graduates are wrestling in Chicago all the time. So we
encourage our current students to hop in cars excuse me
on the weekend to go to independent shows and see
what it's like out there. So they do do get

(33:41):
to experience the big city a little bit through Chicago,
Saint Louis, places like that. As far as where we're living, Davenport,
Iowa is part of the quad cities of Iowa and Illinois.
We're right along the Mississippi River. It's not it's not
a big city feel by any means, but we're not
super I would say there's about three hundred and fifty

(34:03):
thousand people in our area. So you get a little
bit of the you know, the at least the things
to do, right, Like, there are some things to do.
We have bars and dance clubs and and you know,
you can go bowling and go to movies and all
that stuff, but you also have, you know, that small

(34:23):
town living as well, where there's not a lot of traffic.
You're driving by corn fields and cows and horses all
the time, and so you get a little bit of
both worlds. But I guess it just depends on where
they're coming from. For some for some of our students,
coming to Davenport, Iowa actually is visiting the big city
for them, they're coming from smaller areas than even in

(34:44):
we're living in now. But then others who come from
like New York City and stuff, they come here and
they're like, what do you guys do? There's nothing to
do here? And I'm like, well, I'm old man. I
go home and play with my dog and hang out
with my kids. That's what I do. But but yeah,
I guess it just depends on where you're coming from
in regards to your perspective on what it's like to

(35:05):
live in Iowa.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
That's true. Yeah, Yeah. I watched some of the videos
they're talking about the school and they kept saying quad cities,
and I was like, what are they talking about? What
what are the For those that don't understand, what are
the quad cities that do make up the Davenport, Iowa area.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
So there's some debate as to which cities make up
the quad cities because in reality, there's probably like minimum five,
maybe six seven cities in our area that kind of
make up this little metropolis that we have. But in
my opinion, there's the core four of of course Davenport, Iowa,

(35:41):
and then Bette, North, Iowa, which I mentioned earlier was
where I went to high school. And then on the
Illinois side of the river, you have Rock Island, Illinois,
and then you have Moline, Illinois. So those, in my opinion,
in most people's opinion, are the core four of the
quad cities.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
Well, if people want to debate, what would the other
ones be that they think would be considered the part
of the quad.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
So you have East Moleine, which is obviously just connected
to Moline, so there's another one that people sometimes consider
part of the quad cities. And then you have cities
like Eldridge and Leclair on the Iowa side that are
really close. And then you can kind of branch out
even further and you have Bluegrass, Iowa, where I hold

(36:27):
a lot of independent events, and then Buffalo, Iowa, which
is where Seth Rollins grew up as a young child.
So there's a lot of smaller cities associated suburbs of
the Quad Cities, if you will. That People try and
sneak in there, but I tell them it's in the name.
You can only pick four. It's the Quad Cities. You
can't have seven cities in the Quad Cities. It's four.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like you said, it's in the name.
There's no way. Yeah. So when did the idea for
opening your own actual independent company them?

Speaker 2 (37:01):
Well, actually, this has been a part of our lives
for a long time. This was essentially SCW Pro's the
name of the promotion. They were like a backyard fed
and high school kids having a good time. They eventually
made a makeshift ring in a barn and had people

(37:22):
come to these shows that they were putting on. And
this was a pretty elaborate setup to the turnbuckles were
screwed into the support beams of the barn. They had
the cables wrapped around just like you would on an
independent show, covered them into tubing, and then the mat
was made out of mattresses that had metal, sheets of
metal over the top of that, with some gym matts

(37:43):
over the top of that, so it was it was
a pretty legit setup. And me and my high school
buddies went to a couple of the barn shows and
we're like, all right, we got to get involved with
these guys. How do we how do we? How do
we wrestle in this barn? So we became friends with
the guys who were running SCW at the time, and
shortly after the kid whose dad owned the barn was like,

(38:06):
I can't have all these people up in my barn.
This is an insurance liability and I'm kicking you guys out.
So we're like, well, what are we gonna do? How
are we going to keep having shows? And somebody was like, well,
we could just buy a wrestling ring and try and
figure it out from there. So that's what happened. A
wrestling ring got delivered, and we ended up holding our
first show on our first what we consider our first

(38:27):
official show because it was the first show with a ring,
on August thirtieth, two thousand and three, and at that time,
a lot of us were going to day camps with
independent wrestlers, you know, trying to learn things a proper way,
so while not being fully trained, you know, right off
the bat, we had some formal training. I think it

(38:48):
was like three dollars to come to that first show,
but you know, we'll always remember it was Funnily enough,
it was at a church called Saint Mark's. Looking back,
we find that's an ironic name to have the first
independent show, or the first show that we were on. Anyways,
But man, fast forward many years later. Basically the guys

(39:11):
who were running SCW were no longer interested in doing so,
and so the promotion was going to die unless somebody
took it over. And I stepped up and volunteered, and
after it was kind of my baby. I was like,
all right, how can we grow this and make this
kind of a destination spot for people here in the
Quad Cities. And thankfully we've been able to do that.
But I would say I took over probably around twenty

(39:34):
twelve or so, twenty eleven, twenty twelve, and I've been
running it ever since.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
Oh so before the school even happened.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah, yep, wow, this yeah, this is something that we've
been doing for a long time. But this was something
I was doing before we opened the school. So after
the school got after the school was opened, was it
was easy to have our graduates get experience right away.
You know, we can allow them to wrestle on this
S shows and they can immediately get that experience in

(40:05):
front of a live audience right upon graduating. So it's
been it's been a nice partnership.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
Now I want to ask this question, but now I
want to ask it in three different stages. So I
want to ask what veterans helped you out along the way.
But I want to ask as a pro wrestler, as
an as an independent wrestler promoting, and then later as
an actual teacher.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
Yourself interesting, So as a wrestler or as wrestlers. When
we were first coming up as the Black and Brave
tag team, one guy who was really really helpful at
that time was Jimmy Jacobs. He from Michigan, so not
necessarily close to us, but we ran in the same circles.

(40:51):
We were on a lot of the same shows, and
he took a liking to us right from the very beginning.
I remember being on a show, I think it was
a I w a Mid South show with him and
afterwards he was like, hey, we're gonna go get some dinner.
Do you want to get dinner with us? And we're oh, yeah,
that that'd be really cool. You know, I was a
big fan of Jimmy Jacobs when I was just going

(41:12):
to independent shows, so getting to hang out with him,
you know, that sounded like a cool deal to me.
And I remember we went to Wendy's and he all right,
what are you guys going to order? And we were
I think it was some chicken sandwiches or something like that,
and he ended up paying for the meal for myself
and Seth. And it's not like he was rolling in

(41:33):
dough at the time either. And we were like, oh,
you don't have to do that, and he's like, no, no, no,
I'm gonna do that. That's what that's what you're supposed
to do. You're supposed to pay it forward to to
the to the new guys. Someday you guys will be
able to pay it forward as well. And we actually
we do pay it forward. For for every graduating class,
we hold a graduation lunch or a graduation dinner where

(41:57):
the meal is paid for by this and everyone gets
to eat for free. And we do that specifically because
of that time with Jimmy where he paid for our
dinner and told us to pay it forward someday. So
as a wrestler, Jimmy Jacob was very instrumental. Jerry Lynn
another guy who was doing a lot of independent shows

(42:17):
in the Midwest at the time. I got a chance
to wrestle him when I was eighteen years old. I
was very nervous for that one, but you know, he's
a consummate professional and pulled me through to what I
considered to be a really good match. And then we
ended up having a program with each other in Chicago
where I dropped my championship belt to him, and that

(42:39):
was an eye opening experience. He would call and text
and just hey, I had some ideas for this, and
it was just for me, you know, somebody who watched
him on TV when I was younger. Being able to
be in the ring with him and learn from him
and pick his brain multiple times over the course of
a few years when I was coming up, that was invaluable.

(43:01):
But as a wrestler, I would kind of name those
two guys is as two of the biggest ones who
helped us, And from a promoter's perspective, I always look
at my trainer, Danny Daniels. He runs aaw in Chicago,
you know, at one point one of the biggest independent
promotions in the country. They still do a lot of

(43:22):
really large events in the Chicago land area. You know.
He he was my promoter when I was wrestling for
AAW when I was younger, so I gotta and as
he was also my trainer, I got to see a
lot of the behind the scenes stuff about how a
show gets put together, in the thought process behind booking,
and you know, different things that you can do to

(43:45):
gain a larger audience. And so when I started promoting
my own shows, he was somebody that you know, I
looked back on the times I spent with him while
he was promoting shows, and then obviously I had a
direct line of communication with him, so I would call him,
text him, ask him questions, and so you know, I
was able to lean on him as a resource. And

(44:06):
then you know, as a teacher, I think obviously I
harken back to a lot of the lessons that that
Danny taught us when we were training with him, But
I also think back to those day camps that I
was doing. You know, I'll still tell stories from a
Samoa Joe day camp that Seth and I had done
when we were eighteen years old, and he taught us

(44:26):
the proper way to chop somebody. And that's still the
way I teach chops today. So a lot there's been
a lot of influences throughout the years. Doctor Tom Pritchard,
who helped train Seth when he was in NXT. He
wrote a book on professional wrestling training, and I remember
buying the book and taking a lot of notes and

(44:48):
then you get to the end of the book and
he says, hey, listen, thank you for reading this book.
But at the end of the day, there's no one
right way to train someone. Everybody's a different human being,
different individual and they'll all need different training techniques to
help get them through. And that's something that I've taken
to heart as well, and I try to adapt and

(45:11):
and you know, change the training class by class. You know,
what does this class need more of? What can we
kind of Okay, they got this, let's move on. You
know what can we get through a little more quickly
than maybe some other classes got through. So there's just
I mean, that's just the wrestling business, that's life in general, right,
every day. Every day you should be learning something new,

(45:32):
you know, whether it's the tiniest little thing off a
YouTube video you watched, or you know, something as large
as learning new things in order to to better your
your standing within your profession. So I consider myself a
lifelong learner and and just trying to get better each

(45:53):
and every day. You know.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
I live by that philosophy every day too. And that's
why I love this podcast because talking to different people,
you get everyone's different. You get so many different aspects
and different views on life and what they've gone through
and how they have come back from, you know, adversity
in their lives, or sometimes they don't and they just
kind of, unfortunately stick in it. And it's like, well

(46:16):
that unfortunately didn't work out for you, but that you know,
you just got to be a little bit better every
day and keep, like you said, lifelong learner and never stop.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yep yep.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
Well, I mean speaking of that obviously, when you are
training people or people learn, everybody learns differently, everybody takes
criticism differently. Like you said, you were saying the class
itself might need more of this or that, or that
they got it you move on. But when you see
somebody actually still struggling with it or they're not learning obviously,

(46:49):
you know, like I said, people learn differently. How have
you kind of learned to adapt when it does come
to either when it does come to criticism or really
making sure somebody kind of gets it down.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Sure. Yeah, when we first started the school, I was
twenty eight years old. I had grown up in a
professional wrestling business that was all about you know, being tough. Yeah,
and you know, it was a different world back then.
When we broke in in two thousand and three, the
locker room was a different place. And so you know,
we we started out as trainers that we were yelling
at you and pushing you to do this and that,

(47:21):
and you know, like it. And there's some merits to that,
you know. I remember being in high school football and
getting chewed out all day every day at practice. So
there's some you know, there's a little bit of merit
to the old school way of doing things. But then
you just realize that you're dealing with people who come
from a different generation. You know, they weren't raised the

(47:43):
same way that you were. And so okay, what type
of different teaching techniques are there, and what can be
done differently. So we softened up a little bit in
that regard. You know, not to say that the training
is easier. It certainly isn't an easier, but we're you know,
instead of at you when you can't get something done correctly.
You know, it's like, all right, let's let's let's become

(48:05):
problem solvers. Let's put our heads together and figure out
what we can do to help you get this. And
I think one thing that that maybe differentiates our school
from a lot of other schools is that we own
our own facility and it is open seven days a week,
and we have people there. We have we have coaches
there and graduates there who can help anyone who may

(48:28):
be struggling with a certain move or a certain concept.
And you can come in seven days a week to
work on it. You know, outside of training hours. You
can come in and all right, I need to practice
drop kicks because I can't get the drop kick down
and I want to have a good drop kick. You
can do that for hours upon hours upon hours at
our facility, seven days a week. We have crash pads,

(48:51):
so you can try it without destroying your body. You know,
you're not gonna you're not gonna be bumping a thousand times.
You could do it on the crash pad. And like
I said, we got co which is there every single
day that that can help. We have graduate students who
are traveling the country who can help uh. And and
it's really you know the old cliche of iron sharpening iron.

(49:11):
We got everybody. You know. I feel like I became
a much better wrestler myself after we opened this school.
I felt like I was I was practicing professional wrestling
every single day, So how could I not get get
better as a wrestler in the process. So I think
we have a pretty unique spot and a pretty we
we you know, maybe it's cliche, but we can. We

(49:33):
consider it a family, and you know, we're there for
each other. We help each other through and and I
think a lot of people have benefited from that mindset
throughout the years.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
Yeah, I love that now, being a you know, you're
you own a school, you are owning a promotion. When
you look at the landscape of what independent wrestling in
America or obviously I've talked to so many people in
Canada as well. There's so many great companies up there.

(50:03):
Do you kind of see the landscape, not going back
to a territorial situation, but where every area has that
one big promotion and then there's obviously other promotions around
it as well. But it's so it's not easier, but
there is a lot more companies for these guys and
girls to go check out and obviously try different areas.

(50:26):
Because a crowd in Davenport I was going to be
completely different from Chicago. Who's going to be different from
Detroit or Saint Louis or even down here in Texas.
So like, how do you kind of see what the
landscape of pro wrestling is when it does come to
the independent side of it now.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Well, you're absolutely correct. When I broke into the business
in two thousand and three, there were not a lot
of independent promotions around. You know, every state might have
had one, maybe two, and you try to get booked
on them as often as you could. And we were
so wrestling every weekend, multiple times a weekend. But it
wasn't as easy to get bookings as it is today

(51:04):
in my opinion, mainly because there were there were less promotions,
but also we didn't have the benefit of social media, right.
We couldn't record our matches with a device in our
pocket and then immediately upload it to the internet where
somebody could just click on it and watch it, didn't
have to download it or anything. You know, ten minutes

(51:26):
after you have the match, you could upload your match
and then somebody from Kentucky is watching your match ten
minutes after you have it. You know. Like that stuff
just didn't exist for us back in the day, and
so it was harder to get the word out about
who you were and your abilities. So I think there's
certainly advantages nowadays for people breaking in in terms of

(51:49):
getting noticed, but then there's also disadvantages too. If you
were somebody who you know, kind of got it quickly,
and you were young and athletic like myself, like Seth was,
we were able to gain traction pretty quickly because we
stood out. There weren't as many wrestlers as there are nowadays.
There's so many wrestlers. Everybody wants to get involved in

(52:11):
wrestling now because wrestling's cool and they see the pathway
from the independence to WWE, ae W, you know, TNA
and other promotions of the like. So while it may
have been you know, back in the day, it may
have been more difficult, difficult to get your name out,

(52:32):
you didn't have as much competition. Nowadays you can get
your name out very easily, but so can everybody else.
So what are you going to do that allows you
to stand out and rise above the thousands upon thousands
of new faces that we're seeing all the time in
independent wrestling.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
Do you think to help stand out you need good matches?
Do you need a good personality? Good or just being
good on social media? What do you think really kind
of helps set people apart when it does come to oh,
I'm going to go check that person out.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
Well, I think you need all of it, really, Like,
ideally you need all of that if you're going to
succeed and really thrive in this business. Certainly there's people
who are going to get noticed off of a cool
gif that they have on social media, of a move
they may have invented, or something difficult that they perfected.
But it's very easy to get noticed for something like that.

(53:30):
But then when it comes down to staying consistent and
having good matches and being able to cut a good
promo and you be able to tell a good story,
those are completely different things. And if all you have
is the gift of the cool move that you can do.
Then people are going to see through that pretty quickly

(53:53):
because it's the property of diminishing value. There's only so
many times somebody can see you do your cool move
and think you're the most awesome wrestler on the planet.
You know, eventually they're gonna say, all right, what else
do you got for us? Can you get me emotionally
invested into what you're doing out there or is it
just the move? You know, And we've seen that with

(54:15):
guys and girls. They get noticed for the move and
then you know, it's all all sizzle, no steak. And
so if you really want to have a leave a
lasting impression on the business, you got to have all
of it. You got to be able to Your basics
have to be good. Your footwork has to be good.
You're timing, you're pacing, your spacing, all of that has
to be good. You have to be able to have

(54:36):
a good character and to cut a good promo. Your
psychology needs to be on point. You need to take
people on an emotional roller coaster and get them invested
in you as an individual and want to see more
of you. And then you have to be able to
have good, good manners, good etiquette. You have to be
somebody that people want to share locker rooms with, you know.

(54:56):
That's the other side of wrestling that I don't think
a lot of fans think about too often. Is they're like, oh, well,
this person's really good. Why aren't we seeing more of them?
And I'm like, well, yeah, what are they a jerk
in the locker room? Are they rubbing people the wrong way?
Are they pissing people off? Do people not want to
work with that person because of their personality? There's there's
so many different layers to finding success in this business

(55:20):
that you can't really just boil it down to one thing.
You really have to be a master at multiple things
to find true success in this business.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
Yeah, yeah, you're right. Without it out. I've thought that
many a time about like why didn't this person get
you know, get pushed more? And then like, oh, then
I hear backstage. Yeah, like you said, not a great
person to have around. And if you're not, if you
don't have a good attitude, you know, especially during showtime,
then people are not going to want to have to
have you at the show.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
Yeah. I mean speaking of show days, they can be
very long days and obviously as a promoter, you know
how you really fully got to be there the whole time.
Unlike some of the wrestlers they can kind of do
their job, get paid and leave. What are some standards
that are always in your bag for show days?

Speaker 2 (56:06):
Oh gosh, Well for me, I you know, I used
to get real worked up on a show day and
get real nervous, and oh my gosh, I hope people come.
I hope people show up. I hope this is a success.
If it's not a success and it's a failure, that
means I'm a failure. And I've kind of learned throughout
the many years of doing this that there's just an

(56:28):
ebb and flow to professional wrestling to independent wrestling. When
you are involved in independent wrestling, your competition isn't other
independent wrestling. It's not solely other independent wrestling. Your competition
is literally everything. It's independent wrestling. This isn't like the
traveling circus of WWE coming to town, where everybody you

(56:50):
know goes out of their way to make sure their
calendar is clear so they can go see the big stars.
This is okay, Well, I want to go to the
independent wrestling show, but my sister has a birthday party
that day, so I'm gonna do that instead. Or Oh,
the hit new Marvel movie just came out, so I'm
gonna go do that instead. Or my favorite band is

(57:12):
playing an hour away, so I'm just gonna go to
that instead. Your competition when you're involved in indie wrestling
is literally anything and everything. So there's gonna be ebbs
and flows. The draws are going to be up and down.
All you can do is be consistent. That's the number
one thing in my opinion. Be consistent. Don't promise things
that you're not going to be able to deliver on.
You know, show your audience that your product is a

(57:36):
reliable product. If we say we're going to be at
this place at this time, then you better be right
and you better put on a good show. And some
shows are going to be better than others. And that's
just how this business goes. But I used to be
somebody who just really got worked up on show day,
just living and dying by what the draw was going
to be and how good was the show and did
all the storyline things hit that day? And now I

(57:59):
really that you know, there's going to be a million
different things that play a role in whether that event
was successful or not, and you just got to roll
with the punches, and you've got to remember that there's
gonna be another one. And for me, we're putting on
multiple events every single month. There's gonna be another one,
probably the very next weekend. So you just got to
get back on the horse and ride. And thankfully, we've

(58:20):
been really successful over the last I would say five
or six years. The business has really picked up and
and we're we're doing shows all the time, and we're
getting booked for different festivals and and things like that,
and we do our own shows on top of that.
So we've stayed busy and we've we've kind of woven
ourselves into the fabric of the Quad Cities in terms

(58:41):
of being a destination spot for live entertainment. And you know,
that's that's a that's a cool spot to be after
doing it for so long and almost kind of feeling
like the like the redheaded step child of entertainment in
the area, to now be welcomed into the inner circle
is a fun place to be.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
Yeah, I am lucky enough to work for a company
in Arkansas. Shout out Mutiny Wrestling Federation and so what
they've done with getting themselves established in the community has
been absolutely fantastic, and I love that that independent companies
are doing that, because if if you're not part of
the community, that community is not going to come help you.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
Also, yep, I completely agree, and thankfully we have a
very supportive community in our area that has allowed us
to thrive recently.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
I love that. Now I have a question for you,
considering you've been in the industry as long as you have,
I haven't asked this to anybody, and I have had
this thought for quite a while. So when you and
I were growing up, we would obviously see the guys
in whether be WCWWF wherever it is, and they all
you know it. This question is about body here, by
the way, so okay, you always sell the guys, whether

(59:55):
you know they'd either have the shaved legs or obviously
always the shaved our pits because if headlocks were far
more prevalent back then. But now as we've as time
has gone on, the body hair is just all natural.
Where do you think that that happened where people stop
shaving the armpits and then probably other parts of their
body as well. I guess I'm not going to get

(01:00:15):
into pubic situations, but the armpits in general, I've noticed
that there's far more just regular hair now as opposed
to back in the day where the men didn't have
any armpit hair.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
Yeah, I think just as a society, we've gotten hairer
through the years, right, that's I guess that's my only
My only explanation that I can lean on is we
as a society have just become more accepting of hair. Right,

(01:00:46):
everybody's got a beard now, I myself have a beard,
but that wasn't what you know, that wasn't what it
was like twenty twenty five years ago. Some people had beards,
but a lot of people didn't, and it was important
to be clean shaven and whatnot. And I think he
went through the bodybuilder phase of pro wrestling where you
wanted to see the muscle definition and everybody was real

(01:01:08):
tan and they were putting the baby oil on. And
I mean I did the same thing when I was younger.
I wasn't a naturally hairy guy, so I didn't have
to shave much more than my armpits, but I definitely
shaved my armpits for every single show, you know, as
a courtesy to my opponent. But I don't know, It's
just something that we were taught to do. Seth very
very very hairy guy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
I was gonna say, your buddy, Seth is a very
hairy guy.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
Yeah, when he was wrestling in the speedo trunks, he
did have to shave his legs, and he shaved his arms,
and he shaved his chest and his thumb everything, always
shaving all the time. And then when he started doing
the shield gimmick and wearing the long pants and wearing
the vest and everything like that, he said, Hey, I
don't have to shave anymore. And he stopped and he

(01:01:54):
was like, Oh, this is the best thing I've ever
done in life. And so to this day he doesn't
shave anything anymore. I don't think, but yeah, I just
think we as a society started caring more about I
guess maybe not more about but less about everyone's physique
in pro wrestling and more about their work, and so

(01:02:16):
body hair just kind of became a thing that everyone
was accepting of, and I personally don't care. My favorite
rest ser of all time is Sean Michaels, and he
kind of pioneered the hairy chest look at least for
my generation.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
Yeah, I mean I don't have that kind of hair
on my chest. Though for me it wouldn't have been
a thing. But yeah, I imagine there are a lot
of guys that are like, oh, thank goodness, I don't
have to shave anymore. Yeah. Now, I didn't want to
ask any more staff questions, but I am very curious
about his wardrobe. Does he keep those outfits or does
he just using them for the night and then maybe

(01:02:50):
returning them of some sort.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
Yeah, so he has a stylist, him and Becky Lynch.
He is not a stylish person in real life.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
If he knows the guy with a T shirt and backwards.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
He still wears the exact same sweatpants that he wore
when we were sixteen years old going to the mall,
going to Hooters to watch at WW pay per view.
You know, he's still not a similar pair, not a
pair that looks like that pair, the pair. And he
is a he is a worldwide celebrity, a multi millionaire,

(01:03:26):
and he still wears the same raggedy old sweatpants. So
not a stylish guy. So he has a stylist that
that picks out his clothes oftentimes sends him things without
him even looking at it at first, and he gets
it in and each week it's crazier than the last,
and he goes out there and puts it on and
tries to rocket the best he can. But after he's

(01:03:48):
done with it, he doesn't repeat outfits if if he
if something that is sent to him is something that
he likes, he'll keep it and re wear it in
like his personal life. But you know, judging by the
outfits you see on TV, that doesn't happen too often. Sure,
But as far as the you know, the big elaborate

(01:04:09):
entrance entrance jackets and whatnot, a lot of those are
are in the WWE archive so that they can take
him out on the road and display them at the
WrestleMania All Access or whatever they call it nowadays.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
Superstore. Yeah yeah yah yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
And then a lot of it does get donated to
charity as well. He has a storage closet here where
he'll keep some things, but a lot of stuff he
does donate to charity and just just says, let somebody
else get some use out of it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
I love that. Yeah. I loved when he started just
wearing the most ridiculous things. I'm like, yes, this is
I'm here for this all day.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
Oh yeah, I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
Well, I mean we kind of touched on it a
little bit earlier, But as much as this is a
physical sport, it's also a mental one. Now that you
are on this side of your career and you know
you're the rewardness of actually helping a student further their
career or actually you know, find their passion in for wrestling,
how do you kind of mentally either build yourself up

(01:05:08):
for a day or decompressed at the end of the day,
or you know, throughout the entire day. How does how
do you mentally kind of work through all that?

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
I think you know, at this point, I've developed a
pretty solid routine, you know. I I'll usually work out
on show days just because I happened. My workout schedule
has me working out on the weekends. Very busy during
the week so I get my workout in in the morning,
and then I get home and get cleaned up and

(01:05:36):
get dressed for the day, and then I always have
a bunch of errands I need to run, so that
keeps me busy in the morning. But as far as mentally,
you know, I try to listen to some inspiring music,
just some of my favorite artists on the way in.
It tends to be similar, similar artists most of the time,
just because you know, that's that's the stuff I've been
listening to since I first broke into the business, you know,

(01:05:58):
twenty two years ago, So I kind of fall back
on that stuff. And then, you know, there really isn't
a lot There isn't a lot of free time on
a show day to stop and think about much, So
I just I just get the things done that need
to get done. And then after the show's over, there's
still a whole bunch of tasks that need to be
done before we can leave the venue. And then I'm

(01:06:19):
the guy that hauls the trailer to and from the
shows as well, so I'm dropping the trailer off after
the event's done. And then finally, when that is all
said and done, I will I'll come home. My dog's
always so happy to see me. He comes running down,
running down the stairs to the garage and he's jumping around,
and that's always fun to come home too. And then

(01:06:42):
you know, I just I have a bite to eat,
and sometimes I'll pour myself a drink to kind of
ease into the night, and I know after a show
I'm not gonna sleep well because the adrenaline is just pumping.
So I just I don't put any pressure on myself.
I get into bed, I throw on a show, and
I just try and drift off to sleep eventually, but

(01:07:02):
usually it takes me a good twenty four to forty
eight hours to decompress from the rigors of a show. Day.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
Wow. Love that well, So I have a segment. So
I call it the five count. It's just five random questions.

Speaker 2 (01:07:16):
Sounds good.

Speaker 1 (01:07:18):
What is your workout music of choice?

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
I'm a big eighties pop guy when I'm working out
a lot of people like to listen to angry music
when they're working out, but not me. I like to
listen to like Madonna or Prince or Michael Jackson when
I'm working out, just something that gets me in like
a good mood, because already I don't like working out.
I've never liked working out. Even when I was in
the best shape of my life, I didn't enjoy it.

(01:07:41):
So I like to find myself in a positive, happy
mood when I'm working out because I'm already kind of annoyed.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
I have to be there, I get it. Whitney Uston,
I want to dance with somebody.

Speaker 2 (01:07:51):
Yeah, one of my favorite songs of all time.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
Right, If that comes on and you're not dancing, I
think you might want to check your pulse.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
Yeah, it's basically a perfect song.

Speaker 1 (01:08:00):
Yes, number two. If you owned a liquor company, brewery, winery,
not the coffee shop that's next to you, a coffee shop,
or a dispensary, which one would you own and what
would the name be?

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
Oh man, that's a great question. I don't know. I'm
not sure i'd want to own any of those things.
They seem difficult to run. I feel like I feel
like there's just a lot of problems associated with running
an establishment. That's the whole intention is to get people

(01:08:31):
into a different mind frame, you know, Like like I don't.
I often think about what it would be like to
run a bar, and then I'm like, oh man, I'd
either be at the bar at two am, which is
way too late for me. I like to go to
bed early, or I'd be getting a phone call from
one of my employees at two am saying somebody you know,
puked all over the bar and then beat up another

(01:08:52):
Patreon and we had to call the cops. It always
just sounds like such a such a hard life to live,
So I'm not sure i'd actually want to own any
of them. Maybe I'd own a dispensary just because I
think there's some money in that, and I think we're
getting to a point in American society where that's gonna
be legal everywhere, and it's gonna it's gonna be a
business that continues to grow. So I guess I'll own

(01:09:15):
a dispensary and we'll call it braves blunts.

Speaker 1 (01:09:19):
Ooh, that's perfect. Number three. What emoji do you use most?

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
Probably the laughing crying emoji? That's probably you know. I'm
I like to goof off a lot, and so to
all my friends and family members. So we're always cracking
jokes with each other in the group chats and getting
a good laugh. So, you know, my grandma, she recently
passed away. She was ninety five years old, but for
the last ten years of her life, she'd always she

(01:09:49):
would always credit her longevity to having a good core
group of close friends that always laughed together and had
fun together. And she said, as long as you're laughing
and having fun, and then there's more life left to live.
So uh so maybe I got that from her.

Speaker 1 (01:10:05):
That's so true. Uh Number four, Who are what inspires you?

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
I think at this point I I am inspired by
a lot of different things. I watch a lot of documentaries.
I like to learn about how people became successful, you know,
what type of traits they had that that allowed them
to stay successful. So I'm always consuming you know, documentaries
and podcasts and and stuff just about anyone and everyone.

(01:10:34):
I like to read biographies and autobiographies, So I get
inspired by a lot. But I get inspired by the
people closest to me as well. You know, when I
see when I see one of my students succeed, that's
just a reminder that, Okay, I'm doing a good thing
here and and and I'm doing a rewarding thing, not
just for them, but for myself as well. I love

(01:10:55):
to watch my students achieve milestones, and especially when they
check back and they're like, oh, coach, thank you so much.
I just had my first match in Mexico or Canada,
and you know, and now I can say I'm an
international star, and it just feels so good because I
remember what that felt like when I was younger, and
it's so refreshing to see people who's who's who, just

(01:11:20):
you know, still get amped up for things like that,
and and and to see them achieve their dreams. It's
just a really special thing.

Speaker 1 (01:11:28):
That's beautiful. And Number five, what would you tell your
seventeen year old self?

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
I think I would just tell myself to just just
just just keep on keeping on right, like it's gonna
it's gonna pay off. You don't know, you don't know where,
you don't know when, you don't know how, you don't
know why. But but all of this is gonna pay
off someday. You know, you're gonna you're about ready to
go through some trying times here. Man. You're gonna be
working hard, you're gonna be losing money, You're gonna be

(01:11:55):
getting injured and feeling like crap a whole lot of times.
And there's gonna be so many many times in your
life where you feel like, you know, I failed at this,
I failed at that, and maybe I am a failure.
But just keep putting one foot in front of the other,
you know, don't beat yourself up about it, and it's
all going to turn out okay. And also if if

(01:12:17):
you're thinking about doing or reverse her karana in a
tag team match a number of years from now, Maybe
skip that one.

Speaker 1 (01:12:26):
Maybe don't put a poison rana in your repertoire.

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
Yeah yeah, uh, I.

Speaker 1 (01:12:32):
Was gonna say it, but I'm glad you did.

Speaker 2 (01:12:36):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
People wanted to find out more about you, follow you
online obviously if they want to be a student at
the Black and Brave or they want to see the
independent shows. How can they do all the things?

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
Yeah, So I'm on social media at M Brave thirteen.
I just do Twitter and Instagram. I've actually never had
a Facebook. I was a big MySpace guy, and when
Facebook took over, I was very salty about it because
I'd spent a lot of time curate MySpace friends and
so I was very angry that now I had to
start all over. So I just chose not to. So
I'm not doing Facebook, so Instagram and Twitter at M

(01:13:09):
Brave thirteen. I can't say I'm the biggest social media user,
but you should be able to find me on there occasionally.
If you want to find Black and Brave Wrestling on
those platforms, it's at Black and Brave Wrestling on Instagram
at Black and Brave on Twitter and then my independent
promotion at scwpro on Twitter Instagram. I think we got

(01:13:33):
a TikTok. I do not do TikTok. I don't run
the TikTok. Somebody else runs the TikTok. I think that
one's official scwpro. We have a Facebook for that that
other people run, so I don't have to learn how
to do it at almost forty years old. So yeah,
you could find us all over the internets.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
I love it, Meeric, thank you so much for this.
I've loved this interview so much. And I have never
been to Iowas, soo I need to make it up there.
I want to check to school obviously, the coffee shop
and then, but I will definitely not be there in
the winter time.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
Yes, you come find us on a nice, hot summer day.
It gets real sticky around here with the humidity. But
you know you're from Texas, so you're used to it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):
I'm used to it. It's fine. It'd be like a
normal day for me there you go. Thank you so
much to Maerk for being on the show again. If

(01:14:34):
you want to be a pro wrestler, you heard it.
They have people from around the world coming to them.
They've been open for over ten years now and they're
doing absolutely incredible things up in Iowa. So definitely check
out Mark Brave when it comes to a Black and
Brave Wrestling academy because you want to make sure you
are taught by the best. So while you're checking them out,
definitely make sure to check us out. On social media.
It is bruisers Pod that has r e WSD rspod

(01:14:58):
on the Instagram, of the threads and of the tw
If you want to send us an email, it is
bruisers at gmail dot com. If you want to follow
me directly, it is Roady John. That is R O
d I E j O N. Roady John is the
name on the Twitter and an untapped in case you
want to find it. When I'm drinking, maybe we can
have a beer together. If you want to follow me
on the threads or the Instagram, it is official Order John.
So until next time, make sure to enjoy life, drink local,

(01:15:18):
and cheers.