It’s just another Saturday night at the Vanier Columbus Club. To my left, giant paintings of placid garden scenes hang on the wall. To my right, a crowd stands up and chants, “Bite his dick off,” with thunderous enthusiasm.
A man with a sign, which appears to say “Fuck Ace” dances around in the background and in the centre of the room a shirtless man in tight-fitting leggings comes perilously close to kicking a chandelier off of the ceiling before he’s sent crashing to the floor by his opponent.
The crowd goes totally ballistic. Someone in front of me starts a new chant: “This is wrestling.” It seems both hilariously redundant and totally necessary.
I am a newcomer in this world and I appreciate the clarification.
This is wrestling?
I’ve never been to a wrestling match in my life, nor have I watched it on TV.
I stare in amazement as men in tight underwear clothesline each other, flip each other over with incredible ease, and punch each other out. It’s a visceral, and frankly quite impressive, display of athleticism.
The men and women in the ring might be the centre of attention tonight but the mastermind behind it all is show promoter Mark Pollesel.
A public servant by day, Pollesel began Capital City Championship Combat as a passion project in November 2007.
Those first shows at the Vanier Columbus Club drew crowds in the hundreds. Now Pollesel says shows attract an audience of 350 to 370 people.
“It went from a money-losing venture for years to being able to cover costs,” he says.
“It took years of building up. We created our own audience. An independent wrestling crowd in Ottawa didn’t really exist.”
“Historically, we’ve never been a wrestling town. Montreal and Toronto both have a lineage and a history there. Ottawa doesn’t.”
Maybe so, but the Ottawa crowd does not lack enthusiasm. Pollesel says it’s the people who come out ironically that often get more wrapped up than anyone.
“Do it for Jane Goodall!”
Three matches into the night a man in a space monkey costume takes on a muscular Adonis-type opponent. This inspires a whole new kind of rolling commentary from the crowd as well as impromptu performances of the Donkey Kong theme song and “The Circle of Life.”
“Throw your shit at him!” the hooligans sitting in front of me advise.
“Use your space knowledge against him! Do it for Jane Goodall!”
I assume such boisterous audience members must be seasoned wrestling fans. I assume wrong.
“A friend of ours just said, ‘Hey, you should check this out. Go to Vanier, see a wrestling match and have some beers,’” says Andrew Smith, a biomechanics PhD at the University of Ottawa.
“He sold it over like, five paragraphs, like he built it up and it surpassed our expectations,” adds third-year accounting major Andrew Watson.
Neither expected to scream quite so much.
“I know Andrew’s loud and they know I’m loud and we sat together so it was pretty much inevitable. But the show! The show was so good,” Watson exclaims.
Both are impressed with the “unreal” acrobatics they’ve just witnessed and the energetic atmosphere.
“No throat, no energy after that,” Watson laughs.
A free form kind of theatre
I search for the man who made the “Bite His Dick Off,” sign all through intermission with no success.
Kids in Lucha Libre masks are running wild waiting for the next fight and people are buying each other beers, painting each other’s faces, and lending each other signs.
Pollesel says indie wrestling thrives on the community and excitement that comes with live entertainment. A common misconception is that pro-wrestling is all the same, he says.
“Thinking that it’s just like WWE is like saying that every movie is Marvel or Transformers,” he says.
He says indie wrestling is “much more intimate, much more interactive, much more athletic.”
Interactive indeed. Several times over the course of the night entire sections of the audience have to get up and move when the fighting spills out into the seats.
Wrestlers dive bomb from the ring to tackle opponents on the ground and astonishingly do not break their skulls.
This begs the question—how much of this is planned?
“The general frame of the entire show is planned and the structure of what goes where, how long they fight—that’s planned,” Pollesel says. “It’s a very free form kind of theatre.”
According to Pollesel, watching an audience react to his script is what makes all the planning worthwhile.
As the scriptwriter, he plans out story arcs over the course of eight to 10 shows. He says an important one involving a wrestler called Twiggy who’s gone from being a “beloved underdog,” to “deranged,” and “Charles Manson-esque” will come to a head at the next show.
Pollesel says the personas the performers themselves bring to the ring are important.
He says when picking who will be in shows he looks for dedication and “something people can get behind.”
Vertigo and Fuerza
What sort of person has that dedication Pollesel talks about? I talk to Jeff Clout AKA Vaughn Vertigo and his teammate Ulises Minor AKA Gabriel Fuerza.
“A lot of people call professional wrestling fake but I can guarantee that my chest is killing me right now,” Clout laughs. In the final fight, the smaller wrestler got tossed around the ring like a volleyball.
When I ask about injuries they both smile and knock on the wooden table.
“We’ve been very lucky,” Minor says.
Minor is a student in the York University theatre program and Clout is a TV broadcast student at Humber College.
They both cite their childhood love for pro-wrestling as their motivation for trying it themselves. They met at Squared Circle Training in North York, Ont.
“In training I hated him because he did everything I did but ten times better,” Clout laughs. “Anyways, we ended up being friends.”
The two have been tag-teaming matches for a year-and-a-half now.
They both agree the rush of the ring is worth the pain and risk of injury.
“What makes me drive four hours to fall on my back? The short answer is fun. It’s a lot of fun. If you can get paid to do something that you enjoy why not right?” Minor says.
“Nothing else in the world matters when you’re out there,” Clout adds. “It’s a surreal atmosphere.”
Minor says theatricality is as integral to pro-wrestling as the athleticism.
“We have to be larger than life and make them invest in us,” he explains. “You saw the flips, you saw the throws, the kicks. The athleticism is obvious. The theatricality is getting the crowd into it . . . The crowd’s not going to care if we do a flip if they don’t know who the hell we are.”
The personas in the ring are a part of this theatricality too.
Clout says he chose the name “Vaughn Vertigo,” with his style and size in mind.
While “Vertigo” is a motion sickness word that fits with his fast-paced style, Vaughn means “small but big-hearted. In this industry I am a small but big-hearted person.”
The GOAT brigade
Wrestlers Shane Sabre and Kirk Warmack only have one post-match wish.
“Denny’s! Denny’s! Denny’s!” they begin to chant without warning.
“Sorry, we are very much looking forward to Denny’s as you just heard,” Sabre says.
Sabre admits the background story for most wrestlers is the same.
“Everybody’s just a really big fan, looks up a school and starts training . . . You just love it so much you’re like, ‘Hey, I can do that.’ And apparently we can do that,” he says.
Warmack and Sabre met while doing shows in Ottawa together and they’ve been tag-teaming ever since.
“Just an idea that sparked between the two of us. We wanted to be together,” Sabre says.
“We enjoy each other’s company,” Warmack adds.
“We’re the GOAT Brigade by the way,” Sabre says. “It’s an acronym for the Greatest Of All Time. We both have facial hair like goats. And we’re both Big Brother fans, so Kirk suggested Brigade after the Big Brother Brigade.”
Big Brother the reality show, he clarifies, “not the guy that watches you—that’s a creepy story.”
“No no, I never read that book” says Warmack. “Kirk Warmack does not read.”
“We do not endorse that! He does read! Kids read as much as you can!” Sabre protests. “Man, if you’re gonna do that star challenge for WWE, you better fucking read.”
“And you better not swear,” says Warmack, eyeing my recorder.
I assure them this is a student newspaper and therefore they can swear all they want.
“Alright, well Kurt Warmack does not FUCKING read.”
“We want cool shit”
When the audience demands “cool shit” from the wrestlers, “cool shit” is delivered.
The final fight involves eight wrestlers in the ring at the same time. Anarchy ensues—or at least appears to for an audience member.
Individual fights break out in and around the ring and the apparent chaos all leads up to a meticulously choreographed moment when a lone man sends towering stack of four other wrestlers crashing to the ground over his shoulders.
By then, everyone seems to be standing and shouting.
The shouting is important, Sabre says.
“You watch this on mute it’s not gonna be as good. You watch it with a crowd it’s fantastic.”
Sabre says wrestling is like “music or any other art form. If you know the media, you’ll find it . . . But if you’re not into it and you don’t know where to go you’ll never see it.”
He says people who haven’t experienced live pro wrestling before “don’t understand how much of a draw or how much of a family the wrestlers are, even the crowd. Like these guys are constantly here every month—they love it and we love coming. It’s just one of those things I think everyone should get out and try.”
