How viable is it to make wrestling a full-time job in Britain?
I’ve been full-time with this since 2009. I had a day job at the time but it was getting to the point when the bookings that I was collecting at the weekend plus the training schools built up so much that I was having to take more and more time off work or having to cut my shifts down. It was on the cards already and then the place where I was working started making people redundant and I took it voluntarily because I was already getting myself ready for the fact that “it’s now or never” and I want to make the jump. At the time, British wrestling wasn’t doing too well and it was struggling a little bit.
These days it’s certainly more viable to work full time. There is more opportunity now than any time for the past couple of decades to make a go of it. It’s not just because of the increased amount of bookings but there’s more scope for merchandise sales because British wrestlers have become more established names here and abroad with things like Pro Wrestling Tees. There’s a lot of money to be made in that respect.
I had a similar conversation with another full time wrestler, Pete Dunne, and we were discussing the avenues you can go down to become full time. I’ve taken the avenue of working as much as possible to the point of working nearly 300 shows this year, whereas Pete still wrestles a heavy schedule but he has gone down the avenue of merchandising and making a lot of money through that. Then there’s people like Stixx who’s been working full-time for a while but rather than wrestle a heavy schedule or focus on merchandise, he focuses on the training school aspect. There are more and more outlets, particularly with there being more and more promotions who need staff to work on setting the ring up or setting the lighting rig up or filming or edit. There are more and more jobs becoming available to the point where I think British wrestling will become so big that it is seen as a job [in itself.]
What’s your biggest packing tip for life on the road?
It depends how stingy you are with money. My aim is to come home from a run of shows with a profit, so for me one of the biggest things is to have a good diet and maintain that on the road. I always take a lot of food with me like pasta that’s already prepared or tins of tuna (and a tin opener!). I usually take a George Foreman grill with me as well to save me having to spend a lot of money buying hot food or fast food; I can just buy stuff from supermarkets and cook it myself. I tend to take a big bag of protein with me. I have the advantage that I own a car so I can pile all that stuff and keep it with me at all times, which is one of the reasons I tend to insist on driving everywhere myself.
A lot of people tend to have their diet slip on the road more than anywhere else. When you’re at home you can look after what you eat and take care of yourself a bit better. When you’re on the road it can be hard to find places that are open late at night that will serve something healthy. If people are tired or can’t cook, they’ll go to a fast food place or a garage and wind up spending part of their wage on something that’s not going to be particularly beneficial to them.
People need to focus on hygiene in the ring as well: make sure your gear’s clean and you Febreeze your knee pads and elbow pads and boots.
How can you keep your gear clean when you’re living out of a bag?
Luckily, I have several sets of gear, nine or ten. If I’m away on the road for four days, which is usually the longest I’ll go without coming home in between, I’ll take two sets of gear. I’d wear one on the Monday, a different one on the Tuesday, back to the first one on Wednesday and back to the second one on the Thursday. In between, as soon as I get to the accommodation, whether it be a hotel or a chalet, one of the very first things I’ll do is unpack my bag, air my gear out, spray it with Febreeze and let it breathe and dry off.
When I get home on a Monday I’ll tend to switch my bag over and pack a couple of different sets of gear to bring with me the next week so the stuff I wore the week before can stay at home and be washed (properly). I would definitely advise in wrestlers to invest in several sets of gear just to stop it getting stale, especially when you’re working so much on the road: you want to keep clean and fresh.
How important is being able to drive for a full-time wrestler?
I only learned to drive about two and a half years ago, so I went a little over 12 years on a fairly decent schedule without being able to drive. Ever since I learned, I’ve found it’s benefited my career a lot. One of the main reasons I’ve managed to work so much over the past couple of years is being able to accept doubles: if two promoters offer me shows that are within driving distance of each other and it’s feasible to make both shows then I’ll accept it. Because I’m the one doing the driving, I know I can make both those shows. If I was travelling with someone else, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to.
If I’m on the road doing the holiday camps, for example, then me driving means I know I can drive to a gym or a supermarket to get food and you’re not relying on someone else’s schedule or diet plan where they might just want to find the nearest McDonalds. Learning to drive and having a car may be difficult to achieve because of finances but, overall, it’s one of the most beneficial things a wrestler can do.
Do you have to change anything about your gym routine when you’re wrestling full-time?
I’m quite lucky in that my gym that I use is about a five-minute drive from home, so I’ll tend to go at least six days a week. If I’ve got a show in the evening and I don’t have to set off too late, I’ll go to the gym in the morning. I sometimes use a 24-hour gym if I haven’t had a chance to go in the morning. I’m quite well travelled now and have wrestled in a lot of the towns I visit quite regularly, so I’ve started to know where the decent gyms are in each town. As long as you are willing to put the effort in to drive to it and pay for it, there’s no reason at all why a busy schedule should result in not being able to use the gym just as much as you would normally.
Somebody told me recently that I will start feeling the effects of this schedule when I stop. At the moment, it feels like I’m constantly in work mode and the gym is part of that. You’re putting your body through stress and conditioning your body to receive abuse. It’s because of that that my body is acclimatised to working such a heavy schedule. It’s the ones who don’t use the gym on a regular basis that tend to get hurt more often while wrestling because they’ve not conditioned their body to stress.
Does working full-time mean you have to drop certain moves that are fundamentally safe but where the damage might mount up over time?
I don’t think there’s anything I do that’s too dangerous or would cause too much wear and tear. The style I wrestle and the size that I am there’s always going to be some wear and tear regardless of how much I do. There’s some stuff I’ll do on some shows that I won’t do on other shows but that’s purely because it doesn’t benefit anybody for me to do it all the time. The more high-flying, high-impact stuff, the bigger bumps and moves, I won’t usually do that on summer camp shows and that’s purely because a lot of it would be unnecessary for the audiences I’m working in front of. They’re not necessarily wrestling crowds so they wouldn’t understand what certain moves were. For example, a dive over the top rope to the floor: with such a casual audience of whom maybe 70 percent aren’t wrestling fans, many of them wouldn’t even understand why a wrestler would do it.
I can’t really think of many things I do that I feel I’d have to drop because of a busy schedule – for the most part my body’s in good condition. Maybe missing the splash off the top every night wouldn’t be too beneficial because it puts a lot of stress on knees and elbows and your head’s whiplashing back.
With all the travel a full-timer does, is there a secret to wrestling when you are tired?
There’s some period of adjustment you have to deal with but after a while you just tend to get used to it. The first few weeks you do it might come as a bit of a shock to the system. Like with anything, you just become acclimatised to it. As long as you have one or two real rest days each week where other than the gym you don’t do much, and you take the time to recharge your batteries and look after yourself and your diet, it is possible to go out and perform a heavy schedule.
I made a conscious decision a couple of years ago that I don’t tend to go to after-parties or anything like that. I don’t drink and tend to stay away from that scene. When I’ve worked the show, I’ll go home or back to my hotel or the gym and chill out, take the time to have some downtime and relax. That’s important when you’re on the road a lot of time. There are times when I’ve done a show that finishes late and some guys will go out and enjoy the nightlife and arrive at the venue the next day worst for wear because they’re tired or they overindulged. I’m not really that sort of person now because wrestling and performing at a high level is my priority and it should be seen as that. I think it would be very, very hard to maintain such a busy schedule if I didn’t have such a routine.
