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.”