Transcript
Speaker: Hey, pal.
Speaker: We're live, pals.
Speaker: Welcome to this week's episode of Hey, Pal, I'm Coachable.
Speaker: I was about to say, hey, you know, this weekly episode as if we continue to continue weekly.
Speaker: Yes, continue to continue.
Speaker: My English teacher back in high school would be very unhappy with that sentence structure.
Speaker: But thank you for your patience.
Speaker: Obviously, we had a couple of guests lined up for last week's episode and they both...
Speaker: got down with the sickness, which was not ideal.
Speaker: So, you know, life happens.
Speaker: It doesn't always find a way.
Speaker: And appreciative for you guys for sticking around and waiting for this episode, which I can promise to you is going to be a hell of a journey.
Speaker: So now, before we dive into it, a lot has happened in the last couple of weeks since we've recorded an episode.
Speaker: We've got the Cricket World Cup
Speaker: Coming to its climax this weekend, which is going to be exciting.
Speaker: Australia versus India.
Speaker: It's almost been like it's, you know, almost WrestleMania 27.
Speaker: It's been written in the stars that that's what it was going to be as South Africa.
Speaker: Historically, another horrible semifinal performance in an international cricket tournament.
Speaker: The Lynx, they're 3-0.
Speaker: Very much on the card-carrying bandwagon myself this year.
Speaker: I've always had an eye on them.
Speaker: Now both eyes firmly focus on and we've got some winning ways.
Speaker: And, oh, some news out of the Premier League.
Speaker: Last night is that Everton, my beloved Toffees, finally got that sword of Damocles that was hanging over their head, that 10-point deduction, which, funnily enough, Everton have started playing some good football.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Doesn't hurt too much because we're only two points away from safety.
Speaker: But yeah, it'd be interesting to see if there's any sort of lingering, I guess, emotional baggage and damage that comes with a penalty with that.
Speaker: And also some financial stuff that's going to probably come the Toffees' way as well because...
Speaker: We know there's already been a bunch of clubs lining up to sue the pants off Everton.
Speaker: So interesting couple of weeks in sport, but I won't hold you up too much here.
Speaker: You've been waiting so long for a new episode of Hey Pal, I'm Coachable.
Speaker: I'm going to go straight into our guest here.
Speaker: Our guest today is James Hartness.
Speaker: Now James has been a pro wrestler for a few years now based out of here in WA and he's really starting to make his name across the nation in terms of deathmatch wrestling.
Speaker: Now
Speaker: Deathmatch Wrestling is something we'll touch on.
Speaker: We briefly scratched the surface when we were talking to Adam Parry a few weeks ago, but it is a really niche version of pro wrestling, as Jimmy goes into during our interview.
Speaker: So I'm just going to give you guys a heads up.
Speaker: This is going to be a little less of a family-friendly episode than we normally do here in Hey Pal, I'm Coachable.
Speaker: You're still going to be coached up.
Speaker: You're still going to learn some things about that crazy wild world that is deathmatch wrestling.
Speaker: But there's a little more F-words than normal.
Speaker: And I don't mean finals.
Speaker: I mean the flip.
Speaker: But obviously, with a little bit of East London mustard on that one.
Speaker: So if you are usually of a younger age...
Speaker: You just might want to skip some of this today because, or if you're listening on a loudspeaker at work, which would be a very weird thing to do, maybe not the episode for you.
Speaker: But I can promise to you that despite the vulgarity in the language, oh, geez, don't I sound proper there?
Speaker: But despite the language, it is such a fascinating interview about that crazy world and that crazy world within a world.
Speaker: It's almost like multiversal.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Deathmatch wrestling, you've got to learn some things and you're going to shake your head in disbelief like I did.
Speaker: Jimmy has just got a really charismatic and articulate way of phrasing things.
Speaker: Combine that with that.
Speaker: The madness that is deathmatch wrestling, I can promise you, you're in for a good time today.
Speaker: So, without further ado, here's our interview with James Hartness.
Speaker: Well, this week's guest is a man I'm very fond of and he's a purveyor of an art form I'm very fond of in professional wrestling.
Speaker: But what's going to be interesting about our chat today is, as much as I love professional wrestling as a 35-year-old turning 15, is deathmatch wrestling is something that's a little bit out of my comfort zone, something I'm not really completely across.
Speaker: So
Speaker: The man I've got with me at the moment is making a name around the country as a deathmatch superstar.
Speaker: He's made his start in EPW.
Speaker: He's a well-respected, very charismatic son of a gun.
Speaker: We have none other than the king of all the emos, James Hartness.
Speaker: James, hey, pal.
Speaker: Ahoy, ahoy.
Speaker: How you doing?
Speaker: Yeah, I'm doing well, thank you.
Speaker: And I probably butchered your, Monica, because you've gone through a few.
Speaker: But I think I got the basic crux of it right.
Speaker: You are the emo king.
Speaker: Yeah, King of the Emos, East London Ultraviolence.
Speaker: I've got more monikers than I've got matches, honestly.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: That's a good thing to have, though.
Speaker: You're marketable.
Speaker: And it certainly speaks to your career so far, which we're going to dive into a little bit.
Speaker: But as I touched on there, the main crux of our conversation is going to be really the spirit of the show, which is me being coached up.
Speaker: And then by Transitive Properties, our listening viewership getting coached up on the art form that is Deathmatch Wrestling.
Speaker: And you and I have spoken briefly about it before.
Speaker: My favorite pro wrestler of all time is Mick Foley, yet I hate deathmatch wrestling.
Speaker: Well, hate's a strong term, but I'm maybe just a little bit ignorant.
Speaker: So I'm happy to dive into that rabbit hole with you and be coached up.
Speaker: But before we get there, what I like to talk about, Jimmy, is the early life, how someone really gets their first introduction to whether it's sport or wrestling.
Speaker: So tell me about growing up, your first fandoms into sport and or wrestling.
Speaker: Yeah, so obviously the moniker is real.
Speaker: I did grow up in southeast London.
Speaker: I was brought up in a West Ham United household, Go Hammers.
Speaker: So that was the main fandom or sort of like culture I was brought up in was my dad and my brothers would go to West Ham every single Saturday, away games, home games, all that sort of thing.
Speaker: And then on the occasion, because I was very young at the time, I would go to the occasional home game to watch us lose.
Speaker: So, yeah, a lot of my childhood, I was unfortunately very, very sick.
Speaker: So I had a lot of time to be at home and playing Nintendo 64, PlayStation, all that sort of thing.
Speaker: So I got heavily into like,
Speaker: movies, video games, books, just sort of like the escapism realm.
Speaker: But the one thing that obviously always brought it back was West Ham.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so, I mean, West Ham, pretty decent side now that, I mean, you probably felt like it when you were younger, when they kept losing like an Everton fan feels now, but was it just you bought into it?
Speaker: Like it was a family was West Ham or bust with any, you know, I guess footballers from an early age that stuck with you or just sort of the tribalism of being a West Ham fan?
Speaker: It was definitely the tribalism of being a West Ham fan.
Speaker: So it was definitely like when I was a baby, it's a story my mum loves to tell, is when I was a baby, my nan, when I was crying, would sing Forever Blowing Bubbles, which is the West Ham team song, to like calm me down and like soothe me into a sleep or whatever.
Speaker: Unfortunately, from my dad's perspective of the story, it made him cry because it reminded him of how fucking terrible West Ham are.
Speaker: LAUGHTER
Speaker: So it's one of those sort of things of like seeing their racing success.
Speaker: Obviously, I've seen, I watched West Ham lift the first European trophy they've had in, oh God, since my dad was a kid.
Speaker: So like watching that with him was an experience.
Speaker: And yeah, I remember growing up, my oldest brother wanted to be an Arsenal fan.
Speaker: Because obviously when we were growing up, it was...
Speaker: the uh the season of the invincibles and it was Thierry Henry and it was um uh what's it Van Persie and that sort of thing so there was I remember a brief time for about a month when my brother had an Arsenal shirt and then all of a sudden one day during the washing it went missing and he never had another Arsenal shirt after that so um that's never owned up to it but we all know we all know where it went oh yeah um
Speaker: So it was, yeah, it was sort of West Ham was the team, but you supported specific players, obviously from England.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I grew up, I grew up luckily enough with David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, Michael Owen, like really fantastic international like level football players, but I could only ever support them as long as they were wearing white or red and they were playing for England.
Speaker: The second Michael Owen went back to Liverpool, dead to me.
Speaker: It's crazy how that is.
Speaker: I mean, I've actually just started getting through the Beckham documentary on Netflix.
Speaker: Oh, it's so good.
Speaker: Oh, it's so good.
Speaker: We could go on a whole tangent about English fans.
Speaker: You know, I was over in England for the ashes and without offending our English listeners, God, they're terrible fans.
Speaker: Oh, they're the worst.
Speaker: how quickly that that again that tribalism it's like a word i'll repeat but this is what it feels like when you're in like a stadium there and that tribalism of how quickly they turn on a player if it's not in you know their particular colors or you know they'll put that to a side for 90 minutes while they're wearing the england colors and then as soon as that game's over unless they did something special that not dead to me as you just said so absolutely it's the same even these days like i'm still in the same way
Speaker: Yeah, I mean... Maybe because West Ham players don't get called up, but... No, no.
Speaker: Yet our goalkeeper who keeps on letting through... Actually, no, Pigford's a champ.
Speaker: But anyway, I do find it very fascinating that you're a West Ham fan because, you know, in your wrestling persona...
Speaker: You are majority of the time a bad guy.
Speaker: And of course, West Ham were the bad guys in the Ted Lasso show.
Speaker: So I think it's, you know, the black hand fits, to be honest.
Speaker: But we are going to talk wrestling today.
Speaker: So how do you get involved in that as a fan and any, I guess, favorites growing up as well?
Speaker: I have a feeling one of them is going to have a little bit of an English hue to it.
Speaker: so um growing up uh i first got into wrestling through um video games obviously i had a lot of them a lot of spare time so um i grew up in a household where we didn't really have access to like adult content i'm gonna throw out that not like not that but like um wasn't allowed to watch like scooby-doo i wasn't allowed to watch oh wow
Speaker: Yeah, I wasn't allowed to watch that, wasn't allowed to watch Doctor Who much growing up.
Speaker: Oh, that's unfortunate.
Speaker: So that was sort of like the only real way we could sort of have that sort of stuff was through video games.
Speaker: So I had SmackDown.
Speaker: know your role oh wow it was the second smackdown game and i had that on the playstation and i played it so much it might as well have burned the hud into the screen because me and my brothers play it all the time yeah and that was like i was like whoa what is this like this is this is awesome and i was like it's wrestling
Speaker: And then there were the early days of like video sharing online.
Speaker: My brother showed me a very grainy 1080p.
Speaker: Oh, not 1080p.
Speaker: But you wish it was 1080p back then.
Speaker: Oh, God, I wish it was 1080p.
Speaker: God, like eight gigabit fucking video of mankind getting thrown off the head of the cell.
Speaker: Full of choice.
Speaker: At that point, I was like, what is it?
Speaker: And it's just like, oh, you can play as him in this game.
Speaker: And the car crash intro for Mankind's theme song
Speaker: Just like it influenced the early times in my career because I'd always add like something before my song.
Speaker: It was usually movie clips from like horror movies.
Speaker: Like I've used Beetlejuice.
Speaker: I've used not Bates Motel.
Speaker: What was it called?
Speaker: Psycho.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've used that sort of thing because I love that like prelude of something before the song.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I'd always pick mankind and my brother would always pick fucking triple H and he'd always kick the fucking shit out of me.
Speaker: And that's it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, no, your role would have had the hell in a cell in it as well.
Speaker: Cause you would have had denim taker trying to throw him off it.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: But it's funny you mentioned Mankind's Music, and I promise we won't segue too much into the minutiae of, you know, our wrestling fandoms here, but was catching up for drinks with a couple of buddies of ours, Mike and Adam, and basically we were talking about just how terrible Mankind's Music was until he got the car crash.
Speaker: But I don't think it was terrible.
Speaker: Just didn't suit him as he was transitioning into that good guy phase around that 98 Survivor Series.
Speaker: But yeah, as you know, you've always been big on your presentation, whether it's those sound effects or those thick clips before the song, but also just with your, your lighting, your, your videos, which I know a lot of them have been done by created by Giles, who we had on the other week.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: There's a huge part about the wrestling presentation is how you come to the ring and that attitude and that persona.
Speaker: But let's rewind a little bit before you start jumping into stadium shows as a fully-fledged pro wrestler and start demolishing fools here with all sorts of household weaponry.
Speaker: Let's go back to how you did get involved.
Speaker: So we're going to rewind a little bit, but fast forward from where we were, which is very confusing.
Speaker: It's like Adam Sandler's movie, Click.
Speaker: But tell us a bit about it.
Speaker: it's not a banger no having that argument i don't want to see henry winkler cry but um i'm gonna come on a second episode and we're gonna talk about adam sandler and i'm gonna win you over no it's not adam sandler that you won't win me over you won't win me over on click but um tell us how you got into wrestling because obviously that was uh here in perth and uh obviously there was a few thousand miles you had to travel there to get to that point yeah so um
Speaker: Yeah, moved over from England in 2007, sort of dropped away from wrestling, as you do when you get older.
Speaker: And then, of course, as all things happened, got back into it through video games, the Snackdown vs. Raw series, and just sort of kept that up until about, God, maybe 2011.
Speaker: Stopped watching.
Speaker: Because...
Speaker: Jeff Hardy lost a Loser Leaves Smackdown match against CM Punk.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And Jeff Hardy went to TNA and I watched TNA religiously for six months and it ruined my brain for wrestling.
Speaker: I know so much useless bullshit about TNA wrestling.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: um and then yeah i graduated high school and i sort of uh i lost um sort of again i sort of lost what i was doing outside of high school and uh 2014 was uh it's gonna age you eric i apologize 2014 was the year i graduated oh no we age each other on this podcast all the time so that's all good you're just aging yourself there
Speaker: So 2014, Jesus, that was almost 10 years ago.
Speaker: I'm 90% sure that was the year that Taker lost the streak to Brock.
Speaker: I reckon...
Speaker: I reckon you're right.
Speaker: Yeah, because 13 was Mania 29, I think, which would have been Punk.
Speaker: So yes, yes.
Speaker: So 2011 was Atlanta versus Triple H because I was there.
Speaker: 12 was Hell in a Cell against 2012.
Speaker: 2013 was Punk.
Speaker: 2014, yeah, was Brock.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Sorry, everyone.
Speaker: You just got a glimpse into my brain now.
Speaker: Yeah, so, yeah, Taker lost the streak.
Speaker: I got a text from my friend who got me into wrestling, Aiden, and he goes, hey, Taker just lost to Brock at Mania.
Speaker: And I went, what?
Speaker: And then I just got back into wrestling from that.
Speaker: Like, out of spite?
Speaker: Out of spite, because I was like, what the fuck do you mean?
Speaker: And then I come back, luckily, as The Shield were picking up, and I saw John Moxley now, but Dean Ambrose and that sort of thing.
Speaker: And then leading into the next year, in 2015, I was then in Tate,
Speaker: watching pro wrestling and Roddy Piper died.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I went, fuck.
Speaker: I should be a professional wrestler.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: That was, that was the catalyst of me being like, well, I want to do this.
Speaker: Cause I feel like I can do this.
Speaker: Roddy Piper's died.
Speaker: I'll do it in, I'll do it in the hot rods memory.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Hadn't watched them always sunny in Philadelphia at that point.
Speaker: And now I love him even more.
Speaker: So I messaged EPW and I was like, Hey, I'd like to come and train.
Speaker: What do I do?
Speaker: And at that point, we had a school out in Maddington, which is an industrial area.
Speaker: And it was a Tuesday night.
Speaker: And I had loaded up both episodes of The Art of Wrestling with Colt Cabana, both the CM Punk episodes.
Speaker: And I was like, loaded up both CM Punk, Art of Wrestling podcasts.
Speaker: And I listened to it all the way down on the train from where I lived to down to Cannington.
Speaker: And I immediately got fucking lost.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: That's the infamous one where he was just laying out all of his grievances by the festival?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was that one.
Speaker: It was him laying out everything, and that's the one he got sued for.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I was so engrossed in it, and I was like, oh, my God, I love CM Punk so much.
Speaker: CM Punk so fucking, oh, so dope.
Speaker: Oh, my God, I love CM Punk.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I was like, so involved, and I was like, I don't know where I am.
Speaker: So I ended up in the middle of Maddington.
Speaker: I had no idea where the school was.
Speaker: I had a really terrible iPhone 4 that was dying and you had to hold the charger in a very specific point or it wouldn't charge.
Speaker: I was like, okay, it's currently 4 p.m.
Speaker: The training at the wrestling school doesn't start until 6.30 and I'm here two hours early and I don't know where I am.
Speaker: So I had to go into a car dealership.
Speaker: I think it was a Toyota dealership.
Speaker: I had to go into there to ask for directions because I was so lost and my phone wasn't working for directions for some reason.
Speaker: So then I had to wander along the, like, along Canning Highway, I think it was,
Speaker: to turn left to try and find my way down to this wrestling school that I didn't know.
Speaker: Wrestling schools don't have giant, big, flashing neon signs outside that say, this is a wrestling school.
Speaker: At the time, bless the South Factory, it was a dingy little shed.
Speaker: And I didn't know where it was.
Speaker: So I had a Vega dress.
Speaker: It was across the road from, I think, a Macedonian club.
Speaker: Shout out the great George.
Speaker: And I was like, I don't know where I am.
Speaker: So I found a caravan repair shop
Speaker: that was thankfully still open at 5.30pm on a Tuesday.
Speaker: Jeez, that's a niche audience to be open that way.
Speaker: It's a very niche audience.
Speaker: And I was like, hey, I'm so sorry.
Speaker: I know you're probably closing.
Speaker: I just need to charge my phone.
Speaker: I'm trying to find this professional wrestling school.
Speaker: And he's like, yeah, cool, easy, no problem.
Speaker: Obviously, this entire time I've had CM Punk yelling in my ear about how much he hates wrestling and how much WWE ruined him.
Speaker: So I've set myself up for failure from the get-go.
Speaker: And I'm sitting there in this shop and this guy's like looking at his watch trying to close up and I'm like, I'm sorry, I need like at least 15% battery so I don't get killed.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It is Maddington.
Speaker: And it is Maddington.
Speaker: And luckily enough, the school was, I think, four or five shops down.
Speaker: I was like, oh, my God, I've just somehow like lined this up and I've got here in a perfect time.
Speaker: So then I charged my phone up completely.
Speaker: I was sitting outside and then bless him.
Speaker: Dan Ball was the first person I saw.
Speaker: He really is a nice guy.
Speaker: It's not a character.
Speaker: He is a nice guy.
Speaker: God, God, did he come to save me that day?
Speaker: And yeah, I met Dan and then that was sort of it.
Speaker: That was the, the, and then I met Carney on the same night, Tyler Jacobs.
Speaker: And yeah, it was, it was, it was running on from that, I suppose.
Speaker: July 2015 up until November, 2023, which is where we're at now.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And as per tradition on the show, we've dated the podcast, which is exactly what you should do on a podcast.
Speaker: It's not generally, we do it every episode.
Speaker: So that's good.
Speaker: I'm glad to be keeping that on.
Speaker: It's like a recurring theme.
Speaker: I'm so glad I kept the tradition alive.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: No, I appreciate that.
Speaker: We will date a little bit as well when we get down the road and talk about what's coming up for you as well, to be honest.
Speaker: So if you're interested in what James Hartness is doing in 2023 and you're listening to this in 2026, sorry, you're out of luck.
Speaker: Tell you what, go back and watch it.
Speaker: I'm sure it was sick.
Speaker: No, it was.
Speaker: I was going to suggest they jump into TARDIS, but okay, you do that instead.
Speaker: So talk us through what training is at a pro wrestling school.
Speaker: As you said, you started all that time back then, which is still a fair old shift you've put in so far to this point.
Speaker: What's it look like?
Speaker: How's it progressed there, especially in those early days, just before you're, I guess, show ready for want of a better term?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you go through those levels.
Speaker: At EPW specifically, there's levels.
Speaker: So there is...
Speaker: we've changed the name of them recently as well.
Speaker: Oh, Slats, you've thrown me off completely.
Speaker: So we have, so Fundamentals, which was Beginners.
Speaker: Then we have, I'm going to say Intermediate because I can't remember what the Intermediate was.
Speaker: And then we've got Advanced.
Speaker: And that's the only one I remember is Fundamentals because it's not Beginners, it's Fundamentals.
Speaker: So yeah, so Fundamentals, Intermediate, and then Advanced.
Speaker: And basically a lot of the beginners classes is you'll start, you'll walk in, you'll start off with usually a light cardio.
Speaker: So it'll be squats, pushups, sit-ups, sometimes some kind of burpee variation.
Speaker: Sometimes there's a game associated with it.
Speaker: Bobby Marshall, when he was more actively in Perth and less on ships,
Speaker: would do battle squats.
Speaker: So it's basically battleships.
Speaker: You split into two teams.
Speaker: And then if you hit, you have a certain amount of squats given out to the team that got hit.
Speaker: If you miss, then your team does a certain amount of squats.
Speaker: I like how you say this is light cardio and I'm just blowing up listening to it, but yes.
Speaker: In hindsight, I'm blowing up.
Speaker: So and then you jump in the ring for rolls.
Speaker: So it's sort of like a front roll, a back roll, a lucha roll, which is like one over one shoulder and then like a crash, crash fall roll, which is where you just roll through and you slap the mat and you get up.
Speaker: It's usually a couple of rounds of that just to get your body limbered up and sort of like coordinated with the ring.
Speaker: And then it's going through a series of breakfalls, back bumps, front bumps, flip bumps, which is basically just fancy different ways of throwing yourself at the ground.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It's learning how to fall, essentially.
Speaker: It is the school of learning how to fall is basically what professional wrestling is.
Speaker: And then slowly as you progress, then you are learning how to be hit and then fall in a way that you're not just going to crumple on the ground.
Speaker: Because as much as it is real and a lot of people like to take it very seriously, it is a performative combat sport.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And you've got to, like, that's part of what makes wrestling great to watch is the fact that it's a theatrical combat.
Speaker: And, you know, to your point there, if someone is, quote, unquote, hit with a clothesline or a punch or something like that and they just crumple down, it looks horrible.
Speaker: But then if you've got the theatre of, you know, punch and then this big dramatic fall and that sound of the, you know, the body hitting the mat the right way,
Speaker: It's a lot more appealing to watch and, you know, become part of.
Speaker: So it helps build that theatricals to it for sure.
Speaker: But it is, it's interesting just you laying that out as well, talking about how much work goes into not only the falling down, the roles and things like that.
Speaker: Seems like you've got to create a lot of muscle memory things here, especially in a world that can be quite unpredictable.
Speaker: You have to make your body predictable to how it falls.
Speaker: Does that make sense or does that sound right?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Your body gets calloused to it is a phrase I heard once is like, and especially when you come back after, if you've taken time off for an injury or you're just taking time off for personal reasons or whatever, your first bump is like, is like your first bump ever because your body has,
Speaker: has unlearned what it's like to slap the mat and have that impact underneath you.
Speaker: And it is one of them sort of things of like, now, if I thought that, I remember I took a slip when I was first, when I was first trained to be a wrestler, I went over to Sydney.
Speaker: I hate that city.
Speaker: No offense.
Speaker: Thanks to all our Sydney listeners who I know we do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Bless your hearts.
Speaker: I hate your city, but it was, it was a particularly rainy day and I slipped on the ground.
Speaker: And out of instinct, I backbumped and it fucked me up worse than if I would have just fallen on my shoulder or whatever.
Speaker: And it was just that instinct of like, oh, I'm falling.
Speaker: Bang.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: Oh, that spread out everything all over me, not in the way it was intended to.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: It's crazy how it comes to you.
Speaker: Even though this show is about you, I'm going to tell you a story how wrestling training saved my life.
Speaker: Genuinely.
Speaker: I was riding to my mum's place in Maylands.
Speaker: So just on the push bike and, you know, hooning it down.
Speaker: Cause you know,
Speaker: You Only Live Once, and I think I'd watch BMX Bandits that week.
Speaker: But I'm just hooning it.
Speaker: I didn't notice this big stick on the road there.
Speaker: So I've just tried to, you know, move out of the way, have gone arse over tit over the handlebar, and just subconsciously I've tucked the head.
Speaker: and put the arms out rather than just land and fall on my neck and look like, you know, Sabu versus Chris Benoit or something like that.
Speaker: So yeah, it's crazy how instinctively it just comes back to you.
Speaker: But, you know, to your point there, if you haven't done it for a while, it's still going to hurt like heck.
Speaker: Oh God.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's one of those sort of things that was like, he's the muscle memory of like, right, cool.
Speaker: I'm going to hit the mat and then I'm going to get up to my right.
Speaker: And that's just the way you get up in Western wrestling is you get up to your right.
Speaker: So you bang, you slap, and you get up to your right, and you go down again, you get up to your right, and you step forward with your left foot.
Speaker: And you do all these sort of things that it's not, it's ingrained in you subconsciously because you're not thinking, all right, cool, I'm going to take this move and I'm going to land this way.
Speaker: I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this.
Speaker: Like Chris Weiss, when he was in Perth taking trainings,
Speaker: we do what's called the corner drill.
Speaker: So basically you stand in the middle of the ring and people will run in and you will put up a fist or a elbow or an arm or a boot and they will bump.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And that is, you just do that four times and then you circle out and then you come in and you do it.
Speaker: And it's just that thing of like, right, cool.
Speaker: I'm running into whatever it is and I'm going to fall appropriately.
Speaker: And you just learned that like,
Speaker: Someone forgets something in a match or you haven't heard what someone has said.
Speaker: They throw you off the ropes.
Speaker: All of a sudden you're running at them full pelt and there comes their foot and you go, oh my God, thank Christ.
Speaker: And you take the foot.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's that thing of like, okay, cool.
Speaker: I know that boot is going to come right at my face and I'm going to hit them that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's the thing with that training is not only making your body predictable, but being predictable to one another.
Speaker: I think we touched on it when I was speaking to Brett, who wrestles as Marcus Pitt.
Speaker: It's just that, you know, being predictable and safe with one another, that's so important, much more important than, you know, the flashiness, it's being safe and reliable with one another.
Speaker: But as you're going along and you're training and getting those reps under the belt in the school, making that become muscle memory, tell us a little bit about, you know, when you're getting closer to being ready to be on a show, how you go through the process of developing a character or coming up with the name, Jimmy Hartness or the look, the feel, the persona.
Speaker: So, yeah, tell us a bit about that part of the process.
Speaker: so um with that a lot of people get given their first gimmick so um i'm gonna throw him under the bus uh obviously jesse lambert um personal friend of the show um he's a good man despite what i would have to say on commentary when i was in that role but he is a very beautiful young sweet man i'm not sure he's sweet but he's a beautiful young man we do love him despite his many many flaws and um his uh
Speaker: So his original gimmick was he was young.
Speaker: I think he was the youngest one of us that had debuted at that point or going into the show, he was the youngest one.
Speaker: So his persona would be the learner wrestler.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: He's still learning how to wrestle.
Speaker: He's still taking like, I'm getting there and I'm doing this or I'm doing that.
Speaker: Other people like Tiffany and Jack Edwards were put into the role of the TK task force, which is basically two
Speaker: faceless goons that come out with Taylor King to bolster him basically and it became its whole
Speaker: thing itself, like its own beast, basically.
Speaker: Well, they willed their way to tag team championships or a really good story.
Speaker: It actually came up on my memories recently.
Speaker: The work that Jack and T-Panay put in to getting their characters to be front of mind and get people invested to them made them one of the most popular acts separate of the Taylor King character.
Speaker: So more props to them and kudos.
Speaker: It was mind-blowing because a lot of the work was reliant on TK's, well, Tf&A's physical comedy of he doesn't talk, he has the glasses, he is this stocky little, like, bomb of a Samoan guy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Jack, who put so much effort into all these ideas,
Speaker: And he had to carry everything through talking and action and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker: And then even leading to Stephen A taking the glasses off and finally saying a word.
Speaker: And it was two words.
Speaker: And that was one of the loudest reactions of that reawakening that year.
Speaker: It was a whole, like, you get given it.
Speaker: I was lucky enough, when I say lucky enough, I was fortunate enough that James Harkness is a completely me idea.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So, um, the idea coming through when I was coming in was a cat.
Speaker: So it was based on a Tyler Bate who at the time was very, very young.
Speaker: It was my age as well, to be fair.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: So he was, um, like 12 months.
Speaker: This is before British strong style.
Speaker: This was before the WWE picked him up and that sort of thing.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So it was back, back in God, what was it?
Speaker: 2018, 2019.
Speaker: I got told to study Tyler Bate.
Speaker: It was very old British strongman boxing, like carnival boxer was the idea.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's what James Harness was going to be.
Speaker: I don't know how I just decided against it, but I was like, I don't really feel like that's me.
Speaker: That feels like a very dated character.
Speaker: It feels very old.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't want to.
Speaker: I can't portray that character the way that I feel like it should be.
Speaker: So I've opted not to do that.
Speaker: I've been taught a lot in pro wrestling schools as well.
Speaker: You can't just draw from pro wrestling.
Speaker: If you draw from pro wrestling, you are going to be a copy of Insert Wrestler Here or you're going to be this wrestler here.
Speaker: So a lot of the time, the Dom is a big person for it, is where are you going to find inspiration outside of pro wrestling?
Speaker: So for me, I've looked to my roots.
Speaker: So West Ham hooliganism, Guy Ritchie films like Snatch, sort of even leading into
Speaker: that show, I think I had been the trainee other than Chadwick Jackson, Tim.
Speaker: I was the trainee that had been around the longest, but I was the one that had had the least matches.
Speaker: So I was listening to an architect song that about the band architects, their song grave digger.
Speaker: And the opening lines are, you are the reason we are bitter.
Speaker: And then some nice.
Speaker: And I went,
Speaker: wouldn't that work well in professional actually it's like that light bulb moment steve austin talks about when his ex-wife goes drink up your tea's getting stone cold it's just sometimes that that inspiration just it's happenstance it just comes to you it does it's it sounds it sounds it sounds dumb and it sounds cliche and that sort of thing but it was like it was hearing that i saw it live at um the red hill auditorium and
Speaker: I saw Architects live and the weather was dreadful.
Speaker: Oh, it's a Red Hill show.
Speaker: It's a Red Hill show, so it was absolutely drenched.
Speaker: The downpour was immeasurable.
Speaker: They had to replace the mics about four times because the cables had shorted because of the water.
Speaker: And I saw that song live and I went, I really want to use that as an entrance theme one day.
Speaker: And leading into debuting and stuff, I was like, huh.
Speaker: I don't want to use the song, so I'm going to use an Oasis song, Fucking in the Bushes, because I absolutely love Nigel McGuinness, because I love Desmond Wolfe from TNA.
Speaker: Again, there's my terrible TNA knowledge.
Speaker: I was going to say, yeah, that's a Desmond Wolfe reference.
Speaker: I don't think Nigel McGuinness even references Desmond Wolfe these days.
Speaker: Was he a member of Fortune?
Speaker: British Invasion.
Speaker: British Invasion.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: not fortune.
Speaker: I just, it was around that time they were doing a whole bunch of stables and things like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: immortal oh god you're bringing back so many haunted memories um so yeah so i used that for the first show i think because i i think i came out and i attacked bruno nitro and that started my uh my bitter blood feud with him um i love him so much i love bruno so much he's such a sweetheart he's a beautiful man too he really is um so i used that um on the first one then i was like
Speaker: Can't really use that because it's Nigel McGuinness' theme song.
Speaker: People in Perth aren't going to care.
Speaker: I'm going to throw that out.
Speaker: Bobby Bishop over in Queensland uses it now.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Banger.
Speaker: Absolute tune.
Speaker: I'm so glad he uses it because that song deserves to be everywhere because it is an absolute Bobby Dazzler.
Speaker: Yeah, but the thing with wrestling is there's very few things that haven't been used.
Speaker: I mean, you look at moves and things like that.
Speaker: If it fits the vibe of the character, whether it's a song or whether or not it's a particular move, I don't think we're that precious anymore about it.
Speaker: as an industry.
Speaker: I say they're like, I'm still in it, but I just don't, I don't think the industry is as precious about those things.
Speaker: You've got guys throwing, you know, stone cold stunners about like, it's for fun and things like that.
Speaker: So yeah, and you know, everything just gets reused.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I, I'd a hundred percent agree.
Speaker: And it's one of them sort of things of like I was talking to, I was talking to the Ducks brothers recently about it.
Speaker: And it was one of them conversations of like, I really like Bobby using,
Speaker: um oasis like i think that's a really good thing i was like i was worried about it when i was coming in because i was like i didn't really want people to like associate it with nigel mcginnis then i remember we are in the most isolated city in the world a lot of people aren't going to know who nigel mcginnis is it's on the flips on the flip side of that yeah it is one of those sort of things of like if i started coming out to the final countdown people people know
Speaker: Bryan Danielson or they know Daniel Bryan enough to easily type in Daniel Bryan theme song and then the second one that comes up is Final Countdown.
Speaker: It's one of the sort of things.
Speaker: It is that sort of like the distance of time between
Speaker: when something has happened and then now using it.
Speaker: Like you said before, people are throwing Stone Cold Stunners.
Speaker: I'm going to throw him under the bus again, Jesse Landbert.
Speaker: All he does is do other people's moves.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But, well, he's still the learner wrestling, I think.
Speaker: No, has he graduated?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't think.
Speaker: Maybe he'll graduate at reawakening.
Speaker: We don't know.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: Nice little company man sell there.
Speaker: Yeah, I was going to date this like a motherfucker.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So obviously you had that inspiration there to go to your roots for the James Hartness character.
Speaker: Don't get me started on the name.
Speaker: I love it now, but as a Doctor Who fan, I always call you Jack Harkness all the time.
Speaker: How did you come to that?
Speaker: So James Hartness, I love telling people this story because it is so fun and so just easy to do.
Speaker: But basically what you do is the old British style of having a professional wrestling name.
Speaker: What's your middle name?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What is your mum's maiden name?
Speaker: So your grandma's maiden name?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The profession of one of your parents.
Speaker: That's how you do it.
Speaker: It's like the worst version of being an adult film star that we used to do when we were kids.
Speaker: It's your street name and the pet.
Speaker: Yeah, the pet name and the street.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So for me, middle name is James.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Grandma's maiden name is Hartness.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I didn't have the profession, but I could even be the hairdresser or the storeman.
Speaker: And I'm like, ooh, spooky.
Speaker: So James Hartness has stuck Originally a terrible name Again, my love of Desmond Wolf Knows no bounds My original wrestling name For since I was about God, 2007 So I must have been 10 years old From about 10 until about 16 My wrestling name was Charlie Wolf Yeah It's what I always wanted it to be And then I realised it sucked And Desmond Wolf was not Marshall McGuinness And I was devastated
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, you could have done the long lost relative card there or something on that one, but you're probably right.
Speaker: I think you went.
Speaker: I'd say, well, I could just do the mankind thing and one day I'll just become Charlie.
Speaker: Oh, don't, you know.
Speaker: Don't get so excited thinking about that, for God's sake.
Speaker: No, that's, I think that's incredible.
Speaker: But that's, as I said at the beginning of the show, big Mick Foley fan.
Speaker: So, of course, I'm going to think it's incredible.
Speaker: So we'll briefly talk about, because I do want to dive into the death match part of this, but I do find any person who comes on the show, the story of how they've got to where they are very interesting and really important as to why they're coaching me up on whatever the topic may be.
Speaker: But so before we dive into the death match part specifically, tell us a little bit about your debut and the challenges you've had so far being a wrestler up to this point, maybe excluding the death match specific stuff.
Speaker: And then the most rewarding stuff.
Speaker: So just a little bit of a summation about, you know, starting the wrestling part of it and as a performer and what's been good and what's been bad so far.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I, I started wrestling on the trainee shows or showcases in 2019.
Speaker: And then I didn't obviously, thanks to COVID a lot of stuff got pushed back.
Speaker: So I have been wrestling on main shows now for,
Speaker: Oh, my God, 2020?
Speaker: Just three years.
Speaker: Just coming up on four years in February of next year, actually.
Speaker: Yeah, and just quickly for people listening along, those training shows are what EPW specifically called Showcase is now.
Speaker: shows where those people who are training and not quite you know 100% ready for the big main performances in the stadium shows and things like that they get to you know try out their character hone their skills in front of a live loyal audience usually made up of the most loyal EPW members and it's really a I guess a live place where you can try things fail learn from them they sprinkle it in with experienced guys to help assist with that but it's really if you think about it from a footballing
Speaker: perspective.
Speaker: It's like a waffle.
Speaker: It's like a VFL where you can get those reps in and hone your craft.
Speaker: Yeah, that's absolutely the nail on the head.
Speaker: It's very much like the what's it called?
Speaker: Oh God, they have them in the States.
Speaker: It's
Speaker: like not poaching but their their feeder system that's what it's called yes yeah so sort of like um like an ovw for wwe or all of the independents for aw it's like cool where are we going to find like like the next crop of people to come through and those are usually the showcases yeah so um yeah i i debuted on showcases in 2019 and that was actually um
Speaker: couple of matches in was when the first time I actually experienced hardcore wrestling when I wrestled Bruno.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it was that sort of that we have like a year long storyline where I was upset that he was he was Bruno Nitro basically.
Speaker: And he was like, I don't know.
Speaker: It's that meme of Scarlet Witch and Thanos.
Speaker: It's like, you took everything from me.
Speaker: I don't know who you are.
Speaker: That was basically me and Bruno Nitro for an entire year.
Speaker: And then leading into 2020, things went all haywire with the world in general.
Speaker: And then coming back in 2021...
Speaker: I debuted in a tag team.
Speaker: Tag team wrestling is so much easier than being a singles wrestler.
Speaker: It has its aspects both ways.
Speaker: I feel like tag team wrestling is, it gives you more of a time to breathe and sit and figure yourself out.
Speaker: But you are also, instead of thinking for two people, you are thinking for four people or specifically two, because you're thinking for yourself, you're thinking of your tag partner, but also you have to think for your opponents as well.
Speaker: Sometimes things obviously don't go to plan and you have 20 minute matches when you get given 12.
Speaker: And that's also a sort of a challenge of pro wrestling is like that reawakening match, I was less than 20 matches in, I believe.
Speaker: I was less than 20 matches in and obviously it was a massive...
Speaker: um it was a massive opportunity and i wanted to smash it out of the park but sometimes when things when when you're thrown in the deep end and things go wrong sometimes things just go wrong and oh my god they keep going wrong yeah until they don't um and then you take a and then you take a double burning hammer and you kick out because you're based and
Speaker: oh i remember when we put that together that match um we were thinking that just a unique blend of characters the four of you um in that one but yeah as you said just got lost sight of time there and in my role at the time as a commentator and behind the scenes i was just politely going to adam just like why are they still going the current yeah the running joke is now that we're still in the heat so um well no sorry we're working towards our first hope spot is uh
Speaker: Because it's been enough time now.
Speaker: It's been, God, what, two years?
Speaker: I tell you what, and I mean this out of love, it is still a go-to joke in a group chat of mine.
Speaker: It's like, oh, is that done yet?
Speaker: It'll be done when the Reawakening Tag Match finishes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's after the Reawakening Tag Match.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure they're just working to the first hope now.
Speaker: It's two years later and we're still working towards that goddamn hope slot.
Speaker: I mean, it's a big stage and it was a big moment for you.
Speaker: Yeah, it was Reawakening 20.
Speaker: It was the biggest one we've had so far.
Speaker: Jesus.
Speaker: Yeah, Rest in Peace Gate 1, obviously.
Speaker: And it's one of them sort of things.
Speaker: When you feel like you have...
Speaker: a certain level of experience and not, not, not that you blow smoke up your own ass or you feel like you're, you feel like you're at a certain point.
Speaker: There is always so much more to learn in pro wrestling.
Speaker: And I feel like that is something that is lost so much newer with newer people is just because you've reached a certain point doesn't mean you get to stop learning.
Speaker: Oh, without question.
Speaker: I mean, going back to that match, and we won't harp on it, because we're having a bit of fun with it, but you're in there with three really experienced wrestlers, really three talented wrestlers, but you're still learning, no matter how many reps you've put in, how skilled you are, how much you know how to read the crowd and things like that.
Speaker: You still learn, and some things work, some things don't, and it's just the nature of the beast when you go out there live without a...
Speaker: without a safety net, so to speak.
Speaker: So it's no knock on any of the four of you because, you know, obviously you were quite young, but the other three, you know, I praise for all of the guys in that match.
Speaker: So, but is that one of the challenges of being able to come back from something like that where you feel as though it might not have gone the way you wanted to?
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: I felt from that point, obviously our opponents retained in that match, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, coming back from that, it's just, it's, there was, there was, there was a, there was a heavy cloud on it.
Speaker: Obviously we knew we fucked up.
Speaker: We knew we went long.
Speaker: We knew Hayden was hurt.
Speaker: We didn't know at what point he got hurt.
Speaker: There was just disjointed everything.
Speaker: And then it created a rift between us.
Speaker: It is another one of those sort of things of like in the heat of the moment, that, that sort of thing when you can't react to,
Speaker: to a certain scenario and everything goes wrong it can create professional and personal rifts yeah of course and that's that's one thing to come back from let alone the fact that um not not having not you specifically but some of the top top people we would then have to answer to because they hear things that have come from the match that
Speaker: what some of some of it was true some of it was untrue yeah but then you have to once you have to answer for things you did in the heat of the moment things that you have allegedly done in the thing in the heat of the moment and then all of a sudden you're fighting from underneath because you well well you've you've gone out there and you've done this yeah and now and now you need to reprove yourself is you we got to a point where it was like
Speaker: We're at a certain point, we are mega popular.
Speaker: We are getting massive reactions.
Speaker: We're selling, like we're moving merch, we're moving tickets.
Speaker: We're getting like a lot of traction on social media.
Speaker: And it is one of those sort of things like that's all well and good.
Speaker: But something like that happens and it can pull the rug from underneath you completely.
Speaker: At the time I had the Super 9s tournament trophy.
Speaker: It was basically our version of the money in the bank.
Speaker: And then at that point, every possible horrific scenario goes through your head.
Speaker: And I'm like, cool.
Speaker: So we've gone through this entire tournament.
Speaker: I've won it.
Speaker: I've got this title match.
Speaker: Now what's going to happen?
Speaker: Because I've unproven myself.
Speaker: So now I'm going to go out there and I'm going to lose it.
Speaker: Am I going to be Sandowd?
Speaker: Am I going to lose it to someone else?
Speaker: Am I going to be Ken Kennedy?
Speaker: Like what happens now?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like luckily enough, I feel like personally and professionally, we reproved ourselves to a certain point.
Speaker: And then obviously we won the tag titles.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that was pretty fantastic.
Speaker: Oh, without doubt.
Speaker: And at that point, I think what you said is absolutely right.
Speaker: You know, you can go one or two ways in that situation.
Speaker: You can dig your heels in and just, you know, go back further into the crevasse and just go, oh, well, this is horrible.
Speaker: Just woe is me.
Speaker: It's not working.
Speaker: But what I think you guys did really well at that time, you actually took it on board, took the feedback on, worked on whatever it was those higher ups were saying.
Speaker: And, you know, as you said, very, very popular team, even though you were quote unquote, the bad guys, you're getting a lot of positive reactions.
Speaker: So, you know, well and truly earned that tag team championship, which for our listeners, you know, although the results are predetermined and it's a performance,
Speaker: actually winning a championship is quite a notch in the belt.
Speaker: It is an accomplishment because it's a show of faith from the writing team and those in charge of the company that they believe in you as a reliable and marketable commodity.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They can, they can position you at the top of whatever division it is.
Speaker: And they know that they can bank on you now to go forward and, um,
Speaker: represent the company as a champion obviously that that run ended um unceremoniously but um having that even just having the titles for that short amount of time was still very much like the notch in the belt like i can i've said it to you before like yeah cool i can still say i'm a former champion yeah and that's that's that's more than a lot of my contemporaries can say like on the same level all the people that have debuted around the same time as me that's changed more more recently
Speaker: with Fantasia winning the tag titles, absolutely bless him.
Speaker: Congratulations again, mate.
Speaker: Having that sort of like, you are a former champion is a notch in the belt.
Speaker: In the silly world of wrestling, it does add a
Speaker: Ooh, I suppose.
Speaker: For lack of a better word, it adds that like, ooh, that's right.
Speaker: They were a former champion.
Speaker: That is what they did or whatever.
Speaker: It's why people harp on about being like Booker T being the five-time, five-time, five-time WCW world champion.
Speaker: Ric Flair being the 16-time world champion.
Speaker: It's like...
Speaker: They don't ask how they ask how many.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: No, I always love the line about Ric Flair being a 16 time champ.
Speaker: Well, it does mean he's also then been a 15 time loser up until that point, but exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: But having a championship credibility for like even promotions interstate or overseas, it doesn't only just add an extra hot dog to the paycheck, but it just says, okay, this is someone that a reputable company got behind.
Speaker: So we know that we can get behind them too.
Speaker: But yeah,
Speaker: So, I mean, so far, so good in terms of the wrestling career.
Speaker: You have that tag team championship underneath your belt, but obviously there's a lot more goals and things that you want to accomplish, which we will get towards towards the tail end of our chat.
Speaker: But let's pivot now.
Speaker: We've got that background.
Speaker: We know what you are and who you are in terms of a wrestler.
Speaker: Tell me about death match.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: First of all, we briefly touched on it with Adam Parry on a previous episode because he was talking about how he was commentating those shows.
Speaker: But someone who might not have caught that or someone who just wants a little bit of a refresher, tell us what Deathmatch Wrestling is.
Speaker: So objectively, deathmatch wrestling is a facet of professional wrestling in the larger scope of the sport or performance art that it is.
Speaker: it's specifically different from what would be classed as like a hardcore wrestling or like a no holds barred sort of thing because it deathmatch incorporates higher risk in quotations weapons such as like
Speaker: fluorescent light tubes broken glass glass panes lots of glass really barbed wire gusset plates which for people who don't know what those are basically you know the metal things on the side of pallets that hold wood together those or in some wild cases because japan has to do everything better an entire tank of piranhas
Speaker: Have you never heard of this?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Not legit.
Speaker: No, that's not a shoot.
Speaker: Yeah, the...
Speaker: I can't believe you've never heard of the exploding ring piranha death match.
Speaker: Oh my goodness.
Speaker: So I'll just say to our listeners, I knew that this, this part of the conversation was going to go down a path, but you're not supposed to start with a high spot.
Speaker: You're not supposed to say exploding ring piranha match.
Speaker: Where do you go from there?
Speaker: Oh, no, I'm starting.
Speaker: I'm nice.
Speaker: I start the match at the finish, like ding, ding, ding, Canadian destroyer.
Speaker: I'm hitting boss man versus the rock for second.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, boss man versus Eric Rowan.
Speaker: Am I right?
Speaker: Boss man versus Eric Rowan.
Speaker: Boss man.
Speaker: I'm in the rock.
Speaker: I just love the big boss man so much.
Speaker: Oh, who doesn't like a big boss man and the boss man behaving badly, but sorry, piranha death match.
Speaker: Please tell me more about that.
Speaker: So basically the ring was going to explode, obviously, which is why it's called.
Speaker: So what was it?
Speaker: It was the time bomb exploding ring piranha death match.
Speaker: So the only way to win was you had to make your opponent bleed, make them bleed into the piranha tank to get them all riled up.
Speaker: Of course, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, of course.
Speaker: And then you had to throw your opponent into the piranha tank.
Speaker: It was in the middle of the ring, like into a seafrui piranha tank, throw them in there, and then pop the lid on, and you had to hold it there for three seconds, and that's how you win.
Speaker: But, but, if you didn't do it before the time limit expired, the ring would explode.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: I would rather the ring explode to be honest which is like the worst Sophie's choice ever but that's yeah honestly yeah yeah given the piranhas or the exploding ring it's it's a it's a hard 50 50 it's a rock and a hard it's a it's a piranha and an exploding ring really
Speaker: So, okay, that's the real absurd level there.
Speaker: But in terms of, I guess, the difference between, I mean, obviously you're not going to see John Cena jump into a pile of piranhas.
Speaker: If you do, it's probably the latest Fast and the Furious movie.
Speaker: But what would you say, like stylistically, the big difference is between, I guess, what you see
Speaker: In mainstream wrestling at the moment.
Speaker: So that could be your WWE, which I'm sure everyone's familiar with, especially here in Perth, or your AEWs or whatever, your New Japans as well to an extent.
Speaker: So you're like your different wrestling tastes versus what you're going to see stylistically in a death match setting.
Speaker: So really, it depends.
Speaker: So every country, it's like pro wrestling.
Speaker: Every country has a different style of pro wrestling.
Speaker: So Japanese deathmatch wrestling specifically, it is a match.
Speaker: It's just a regular wrestling match.
Speaker: But in certain spots, weapons are introduced.
Speaker: So a big thing over in Japan is the light tubes, like the light tube aspects or the panes of glass aspect.
Speaker: Or they'll use thumbtacks and wire.
Speaker: That's where like the Piranha death match and all that sort of stuff comes from.
Speaker: It's like there is a wrestling match going on in the surrounds of Japan.
Speaker: like a death match sort of thing.
Speaker: Whereas the American style usually made popular by like a CZW or IWA Mid-South and that sort of stuff is, it's more bot orientated, especially more, not lower levels, but sort of like, yeah,
Speaker: smaller sort of death match feds.
Speaker: It's very like, we're going to do this big spot and then you're going to get up and we're going to do this big spot.
Speaker: And we're going to, it's, it's more the matches based around the weapons rather than the weapons are intermittently put in through the match.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Do you have a big thing?
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: You're going to, yeah, no, sorry.
Speaker: Do you have a preference there yourself?
Speaker: Just, I think you lean one way based on just the way you've described both of those styles, but do you have a preference when it comes to death match wrestling?
Speaker: I definitely lean more towards trying to emulate more of a Japanese-style deathmatch.
Speaker: So, again, that's sort of like the King of the Deathmatch tournament that Mick Foley won.
Speaker: Again, it's one of those sort of things of like a no-rope barbed wire match.
Speaker: The whole thing is there is a wrestling match happening, but all of the ropes are barbed wire.
Speaker: So you can't really run the ropes, you can't jump off of them, or you can, but you have to be careful of the wire or whatever.
Speaker: So I much prefer sort of like, right, we will tell, like, this is the story we are going to tell with this match, and here are the weapons that we have involved.
Speaker: Like, my most recent deathmatch was against Felix Young in a famous last words coffin deathmatch.
Speaker: So the...
Speaker: The crux of it was we had a massive coffin and to win the match you had to put your opponent in the coffin, close the lid.
Speaker: Like a regular coffin match.
Speaker: We've seen that in WWE No dramas there Like the Undertaker would do a casket match And that sort of thing That's easy Exactly or like AEW recently did Sting and Darby Allin Versus Christian Cage and Swerve Strickland I will say Sting at 63 or whatever Doing coffin matches Is just as risky as a deathmatch one I reckon What a machine he is God I love Sting Coming up to seek and destroy and everything Hell yeah
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: But yeah, so throughout the match, there was various weapons.
Speaker: Like we had a skeleton because it was Halloween themed, but it was emo themed.
Speaker: So there was like a skeleton, but there was also we had bundles of light tubes.
Speaker: Like I took a curb stomp through light tubes purely because I could have taken the curb stomp on the floor.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or...
Speaker: um Felix could bring in the light tubes and do even more damage by stomping me through the tubes yeah it was a match where a lot of the stuff could have happened irregardless of the weapons but the weapons were there to amplify it yeah like at one point I gave him a body slam I could have body slammed him onto the floor I didn't I body slammed him onto chairs
Speaker: Or he hit me with, when I wrestled Clint Margera, a move that a close personal friend of mine, Elijah Henry, loves to do, is the snapmare back kick.
Speaker: Okay, yeah.
Speaker: It's interesting when you talk about those spots or sequences or moves, depending on how into the weeds you want to go there with it.
Speaker: But it's interesting that the fundamentals of it are still the fundamentals.
Speaker: So you still need to be able to successfully and safely do a body slam or a kick or something like that.
Speaker: So you need that grounding in the fundamentals of pro wrestling to still be a good death match wrestler from what I can tell.
Speaker: But that'd be fair to say that you still need to have good fundamentals to do it well.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Neil Diamond Cutter, who the original Prince of the Deathmatch, when he came over for Dream this most recent year, getting to talk to him was just absolutely mind-blowing because he's been doing it for years, like 2003, I believe.
Speaker: Very, very early doors for Deathmatch wrestling in the States and stuff.
Speaker: And hearing him talk and he's just sort of like, he's like, I can wrestle.
Speaker: He goes, he's like, I've been wrestling for this long.
Speaker: I don't just do deathmatch wrestling.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He goes, it takes a very good professional wrestler to be, you can be a wrestler and you can be a deathmatch wrestler.
Speaker: It takes a very good professional wrestler to be a very good deathmatch wrestler.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Because as much as you can just go out there and I can swing light tubes and I can do all these like, oh, I'm going to throw you through this or I'm going to hit you with this or I'm going to do this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's all well and good.
Speaker: But at some point, what?
Speaker: It's just, it's just, right, what are you going to do now?
Speaker: Well, yeah, I ask this respectfully.
Speaker: You say you have to be a very good professional wrestler to be a very good deathmatch wrestler, but can it be very easy to be a very bad deathmatch wrestler?
Speaker: Is there a lot of that that goes around the scene, unfortunately?
Speaker: It is incredibly easy to be a dangerous and bad deathmatch wrestler just purely based on so many factors.
Speaker: There's a certain level.
Speaker: Everyone in wrestling is a little bit
Speaker: is a little bit not there in the way of like, you have to, you have to be very peculiar to get into your pants, to go and wrestle in front of people and hope that they either hate you or like you.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: That is the same sort of thing with death matches.
Speaker: It's sort of like, again, I could go down the park and give two 15 year olds light tubes and go right now, start smacking each other.
Speaker: They're not death match wrestlers or they fit.
Speaker: They now think they are like light tubes.
Speaker: Don't make you a death match wrestler.
Speaker: barbed wire doesn't make you a deathmatch wrestler having having a uh the thought process of this is this is specifically deathmatch wrestling i'm going to do it to the best of my ability because deathmatch is an art form yeah deathmatch is very very is very very um subjective i would not put
Speaker: like Mick Foley versus Terry Funk in a Texas death match is like a Picasso painting.
Speaker: I would not put that.
Speaker: I would, that is art.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just, just like, yeah, two, two 16 year olds in their back garden with ropes made of like string on a trampoline hitting each other with weapons.
Speaker: is like a two-year-old's finger painting.
Speaker: Two different ends of the spectrum for art.
Speaker: They are both the same thing, just vastly different.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a really good way of putting it.
Speaker: You know, as I shared no secret as much as I love you, that I'm always a little bit skeptical on the death match wrestling, but that that's a really nicely way, a nice way that you've surmised it there.
Speaker: Can I ask again, I apologize.
Speaker: I feel as though we've gone on the beat and track, you know, like a good interview.
Speaker: I've given you a bunch of questions that I was going to ask and we've kind of segued organically in different parts of the conversation, but yeah,
Speaker: I mean, again, Mick Foley is my guy.
Speaker: And obviously that's how you were first introduced there as well with that grainy Hell in a Cell footage from 1998 as well.
Speaker: Do you think the fact that his story was so mainstream publicized in terms of the story that WWF told at the time of him jumping off the roof of his house, having that backyard wrestling match,
Speaker: Does it sort of glorify and sort of start the progression of, you know, not necessarily just people believing if they have a dream they can work on it, which was the point of it, but maybe those people thinking, well, I've got a backyard, I've got a roof, I've got a weapon, I've got this.
Speaker: Do you think that played a big part in it or was it always just going to organically go this way?
Speaker: It's that sort of, it is that hard sort of thing because like it's the classic, I've had surgery five times in my left knee, don't try this at home.
Speaker: It's just like, I'm going to do it anyway.
Speaker: I'm still going to drop kick my cousin on the sofa, accidentally break the sofa and then, I don't know, blame the dog on it.
Speaker: Like there was always going to be that sort of thing of like, oh my God, that's so cool.
Speaker: I can't wait to do it outside of
Speaker: whatever I'm watching because it's always going to be monkey see monkey do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Even to like, even to this day, it always says, please do not try this at home.
Speaker: But in like 2015, Seth Rollins had to stop doing the curb stomp because too many kids were doing it on the playground.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's one of them, it is one of them sort of things.
Speaker: A friend of mine,
Speaker: when we were kids, when we were in year six, he was hanging off of the monkey bars like Jeff Hardy at WrestleMania.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Another friend of mine ran through and fucking speared him off of it and he broke his collarbone.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's not Mick Foley.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, no, that's fair.
Speaker: It was one of those sort of things of like, but you, the WWE had this really weird thing where they'd show like the Hardy Boys and it's like, here's them in their back garden.
Speaker: They need a ring out of mattresses and some string or here's Mick Foley jumping off of the roof.
Speaker: Or here's like Edge and Christian being kids wrestling around or whatever.
Speaker: And then it's like, oh, well, we can do that.
Speaker: And then all of a sudden it's don't try us at home.
Speaker: It's like, but they did.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But they did.
Speaker: And Mick Foley won the WWE title.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Jeff Hardy and Matt Hardy are super awesome.
Speaker: Like, why wouldn't I do that?
Speaker: Such a good point there.
Speaker: Because I completely blanked on the fact that they use the Hardy Boys stuff as well.
Speaker: And that was about 2000, 2001.
Speaker: I think mainly 2000 when they were feuding with Edgy and Christian about that.
Speaker: But yeah, it's crazy how they, you're right.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Like they show.
Speaker: people growing up and doing it and I think it also correct me if I'm wrong it was just maybe a little bit of a perfect storm for and I and again I preface this with bad backyard slash deathmatch wrestlers and I don't think you would call them deathmatch wrestlers to be honest those backyard that crew but I think the sort of the rise of the the jackass stuff at the same time the rise of being able to film something as well and oh god yeah
Speaker: People put those three things together.
Speaker: It's like, hey, I can film it.
Speaker: These jackass guys do it.
Speaker: And I love wrestling because wrestling is everything at the moment.
Speaker: I've got my Limp Bizkit album, got my WWF on and jackass is big.
Speaker: I can film this.
Speaker: And then it kind of creates a subculture of really bad backyard weapons versus what you're talking about, which is the death match wrestling in a proper environment with people who know what they're doing.
Speaker: Yes, it's dangerous.
Speaker: Of course it is.
Speaker: Most performance arts are in some way.
Speaker: but you've been trained to try and work around it.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: It's the, it was the thing of like ECW was massive in the nineties.
Speaker: It was at a point where tape traders were trading like Masato Tanaka versus Mike Orson, or they were trading like that no ring barbed wire match between Sabu and Terry Funk.
Speaker: And it's one of them sort of things of like, you can see that and you can go, it is the exact same, in my opinion, it's the exact same thing of seeing, I don't know, Jeff Hardy is...
Speaker: on the telly and he's doing swanton bombs and I love Jeff Hardy and I'm going to do swanton bombs on my, on my couch or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's probably the same exact thing of like kids in rural, like,
Speaker: louisiana or whatever it is and it's just like oh well we've got spare barbed wire from like like hocking up the cows in the fences louisiana the the barbed wire capital of the world but i take it yeah they got the barbed wire down in dubai you and they're gonna be fighting alligators and they're gonna have barbed wire instead of ropes and it's one sort of things it's like if you see it you can do it because they can do it and
Speaker: So it's in the world and you know that it's a thing that can happen.
Speaker: So it was like when ECW finished, obviously there was that gap in Philly.
Speaker: And that's when Ring of Honor started and CZW started.
Speaker: Or, oh God, what was it called?
Speaker: XPW and what was the offshoot deathmatch stuff started up in the wake of ECW folding.
Speaker: There was that void.
Speaker: There was the void and it was, boy, was it filled.
Speaker: Because Lujak wanted to get paid every single weekend, rest in peace.
Speaker: And like, he was going to be flying around the country to do these death matches and like, Stabu was still getting paid money because he wasn't in the Fed yet.
Speaker: And like before the ECW revival and all that sort of thing.
Speaker: So like,
Speaker: It was because you could go to a local show and they're running Sabu versus their local guy in an O-ring barbed wire match.
Speaker: And then all of a sudden, every kid now knows, oh, that's the thing you can do.
Speaker: It's like Lobo and Mad Dog.
Speaker: The infamous no rope barbed wire match in Australia that like dirtied the name of deathmatch wrestling for many, many, many, many years.
Speaker: It's that sort of thing of like, you can go out there and you can do it and the kids can watch it and they can go, well, we can do that too.
Speaker: It's like, it's, it's the cognitive thing of like, that is something I want to do.
Speaker: I'm going to do it.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: No, you go home and you hit your brother with a chair and you break the chair and now you're in trouble.
Speaker: Well, I mean, that's the thing, like taking the death match element out of it for a moment.
Speaker: You know, there's no doubt that my kid brother and I would always be wrestling when, you know, in 99, 2000.
Speaker: It's like, don't do this.
Speaker: Too bad.
Speaker: I've already got him up for the chokeslam.
Speaker: I've already taken my sock off to shove down his throat, which if you're a wrestling fan, that makes sense.
Speaker: If you're new to wrestling, it doesn't make sense.
Speaker: I'm not a weirdo.
Speaker: Please don't send him letters.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: With this, let's sort of, I had a question here, but I'm going to circle back to it more towards the end of our conversation.
Speaker: Let's talk about you, your favorite deathmatch wrestlers, why they appeal to you as well.
Speaker: So this actually properly stumped me.
Speaker: When you sent through the questions for this, there was a lot of stuff and I was just sort of like, oh my God, it's
Speaker: I've not thought about it for ages.
Speaker: I was talking to a friend of mine very recently that I find it now, I don't know why, now being in the industry maybe for so many years, I find it hard to have favorites.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Because, not that I feel like I'm betraying anyone, but I'm like, well, I like a lot of different people for a lot of different aspects.
Speaker: So I have to really have a deep think about my favorite deathmatch wrestlers.
Speaker: Obviously, top of the list is me.
Speaker: you have to have that black hand glove on don't you at all times oh absolutely absolutely i always always have to always have to keep myself at the top and the bottom of the pedestal just in case um but like yeah a lot of um a lot like a lot of a lot of names came to mind when i first when i first thought about it like um akira from from america i was a newer guy who does like more of a
Speaker: It's what he's called like a hybrid style.
Speaker: It's very like catch-as-catch-can wrestling, like a Timothy Thatcher or a Bryan Danielson, but again, does that, but also does death matches.
Speaker: Ricky Shane Page has always been one that stood out to me as well.
Speaker: Watching Fight Club Pro when I was...
Speaker: very getting into pro wrestling.
Speaker: So like Progress, Fight Club Pro, a lot of the UK independents and that sort of thing.
Speaker: And that was the first time I saw Clint Margera, who I was fortunate enough to wrestle at the end of August, which was an absolutely mind-blowing experience because I watched him, Drew Parker, and Jimmy Havoc in Cage of Death.
Speaker: What was it?
Speaker: um death house like a no no it was um fight club pro but um they wrestled in like a it was like a scaffold it was a whole death match and it was it was like that was mind-blowing for like triple threat death matches and all that sort of stuff so again another name i just dropped was drew parker um a younger a younger sort of wrestler um from the uk he's retired now unfortunately um but yeah so he went over to um to japan to make his name over there with um
Speaker: Guys like Abdullah Kobayashi, which I'm 90% sure is his name, is a big deathmatch guy over there.
Speaker: Jun Kasai, El Desperado in more recent times.
Speaker: And then obviously the big one more recently is the more mainstream one is Jon Moxley.
Speaker: Yeah, I was going to ask you about Moxley because he's incorporated elements of that deathmatch style into the AEW platform.
Speaker: For those who are unaware of AEW, might just know WWE is the thing that John Cena does.
Speaker: AEW is pretty much, well, he is the second best promotion in the world in terms of exposure and fanfare and performance.
Speaker: and all the deals and licensing to go around there.
Speaker: So it's a, it's a promotion founded by a billionaire.
Speaker: Who's trying to really have that challenger brand to the WWE style.
Speaker: John Moxley of course used to be Dean Ambrose of the shield back in the WWE.
Speaker: And he's gone over to this promotion and, and yeah, really blends elements of death match into that AEW sort of mainstream promotion.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Moxie is one of those sort of ones when I got back into wrestling in 2014,
Speaker: he caught my eye on the WWE level because I see coming back into wrestling, all I know is WWE because WCW is awful and it's always been awful because that's always what I've been fed.
Speaker: Going back and watching WCW now, it's awesome.
Speaker: It never should have gone out of business no matter how terrible 2001 was.
Speaker: It wasn't 2001, it was 2000 that did it in.
Speaker: Let's be honest, 2000 that did it in.
Speaker: It just got to 2001 somehow.
Speaker: It crept over the line.
Speaker: God, it was so good, though.
Speaker: It wasn't at all.
Speaker: But, like, watching old ECUW, like, my all-time favourite pay-per-view of all time, Heatwave 98.
Speaker: Oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker: That's Jerry Lynn RVD?
Speaker: No, it's... Wow, that's the one pay-per-view that wasn't the one.
Speaker: I think that must have been the Heatwave the year before, but this one was...
Speaker: the opener was Jerry Lynn versus Just Incredible.
Speaker: I'm 90% sure.
Speaker: It was Jerry Lynn versus Just Incredible.
Speaker: It was Bam Bam and Taz and they go through the ring.
Speaker: That's the one.
Speaker: So like, yeah.
Speaker: So I'm loving ECW now, like watching it back and like all the like hardcore TVs and that sort of thing.
Speaker: Like Chris Candido, love it.
Speaker: The...
Speaker: yeah so seeing i completely got sidetracked but yeah seeing um dean ambrose was like this brawler sort of guy comes out in like the tank top and the jeans comes out it's like the loud music like fists taped up like he's gonna fight and i'm like this guy's pretty cool and then you google him and then it's like the czw days of him like being in tournament of death and being in iwa mid-south and
Speaker: And then from then it goes to like, I found Samoa Joe versus Necro Butcher, which is one of the best matches of all time.
Speaker: It's not, it's great, but it's also not the best match of all time.
Speaker: Unless you ask me and I will put it on and we will sit there for 12 minutes while Samoa Joe beats up Necro Butcher and I go, how good is this?
Speaker: How good is this, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, once he left, Mox sort of went to go back into more of that deathmatch sort of style.
Speaker: He's had deathmatches with like Nick Gage in GCW.
Speaker: And even like, I actually had it as an answer for my next question, but I'll bring it up now.
Speaker: One of my favorite deathmatches of more recent time is Jon Moxley bringing deathmatches to AEW in the form of the Texas deathmatch.
Speaker: Okay, yep.
Speaker: Is that the one against Paige or there's a one specifically that's caught your eye?
Speaker: It is the one against Paige.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: It's the Hangman Paige one.
Speaker: I thought just one of the best death matches I've seen and it was on the second biggest wrestling company in all of America, basically.
Speaker: And it's seeing that, like, I know a lot of people do not like how Moxley wrestles.
Speaker: I can completely understand that.
Speaker: He bleeds a lot.
Speaker: He brawls a lot.
Speaker: He's not very like, it's not very finessed.
Speaker: It's not very like, it's smooth without being smooth.
Speaker: It's like smooth as, it's as smooth as crunchy peanut butter, basically.
Speaker: It's the way I'd like to describe how he wrestles.
Speaker: Also the way I like to describe how I wrestle, but crunchy Biscoff.
Speaker: No, no, stick with the peanut butter.
Speaker: Stick with the winner.
Speaker: Stick at the top of the.
Speaker: No, no, no, no.
Speaker: It's crunchy peanut.
Speaker: It's crunchy Biscoff because I'm a little bit sweeter.
Speaker: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker: Oh, so I've never known you to be sweet unless you're out of character.
Speaker: But, but yeah, it's an interesting one there because they, it's a very raw style.
Speaker: Like it feels authentic.
Speaker: Yeah, it's that brawler sort of like this... Whereas you can watch like a Pentagon Jr. who is also another... who's also done death matches.
Speaker: His one against Vampiro in Lucha Underground also comes to mind when I think of my favorites just because...
Speaker: it was one of my first sort of like exposures to that level of violence on like a well-produced stage, I guess.
Speaker: Again, with Lucha Underground, I'll come back to that in a minute.
Speaker: But yeah, when Mox gets in there, you know he's there to...
Speaker: fight it's there for the brawl it's not like you're going to watch like a zack saber jr or a danielson or a swerve strickland or um someone who is more cleaner and smooth with how they wrestle and it's like yeah he can still he can still hang with like um like danielson and mox had a great um match before they formed the blackpool combat club yes but it's one of those sort of things of like moxley goes in there i like wrestlers who go in there and they think it's real
Speaker: It's why I'm a really big fan of Eddie Kingston is because I can watch Eddie Kingston cut a promo on someone like Cloyo Castagnoli.
Speaker: And I'm like, oh, he hates him.
Speaker: He hates him for real.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And he's going to go in there and he's going to like, he's going to actually like go in there and fight him.
Speaker: And that's what I love.
Speaker: I love that style of pro wrestling.
Speaker: Is that authentic sort of like, no, yeah, this is a, in quotes, fake sport, but we are going to fight like it isn't.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and that believability, I know I'm taking away from like the, the physicality of it, but I know, again, we probably have to think about how many times I've said Mick Foley on this conversation, but you know, when he talks about being a bad guy, it's like, you have to believe that you're the bad guy and your justification is 100% correct, no matter how wrong it actually may be.
Speaker: And that's the same, the same thing there.
Speaker: It's not,
Speaker: not someone going in there and actually punching the heck out of someone or anything like that, but that character and that mindset, you've got to believe that you're in there for the fight of your life.
Speaker: And fans flock to that and they gravitate towards it.
Speaker: That's why Moxley has such a following, even before he was able to have the, I was going to say the reins, but that was an inadvertent pun.
Speaker: But ever since he had the reins taken off him and those constraints of the WWE machine, they could see that through it for sure.
Speaker: Um, you touched on Lucha Underground.
Speaker: Is that part of some of the other matches that you've enjoyed from a death match perspective?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Just, um, quickly touching on what you were saying about, um, that believability.
Speaker: I, I, I harp on it enough in person, but I want to put it down on, um, on audio form, I guess.
Speaker: Um, the biggest thing for me, um, coming into pro wrestling is that believability and like saying everything that I wanted to say with such a conviction of like up to a certain point,
Speaker: the villain can be justified up until that very last moment where they switch and I learned that specifically from watching Davis Storm when he was the Messiah because I remember this one promo I can't remember what show it was but I was ringside for it because I was a cameraman and he was talking about how
Speaker: the EPW title means everything to him.
Speaker: He built this company.
Speaker: He's put all of his like blood and his sweat and his tears.
Speaker: He's wasted time that he could be spending with his children, but like, like strained relationships in his personal life and all that sort of thing.
Speaker: And you're like, Oh man, that's like, that's really like that Sabbath and genuinely like, like a heart, like he's opening up and it's a heart, like heart wrenching sort of thing because they can carry himself with such a conviction.
Speaker: And then just the last line he used goes,
Speaker: and I'm going to hold on to this title no matter how many people I have to break and how much I have to do.
Speaker: And I'm just like, oh, my God.
Speaker: And the switch is there.
Speaker: And he's just like, oh, maybe all these things would be justified if he said he wasn't going to, like, stomp a 10-year-old to death to keep this title.
Speaker: Like, is that, like... That by any means necessary is the crossing the line.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: But yeah, Lucha Underground, I absolutely love.
Speaker: I love going back and watching the highlights of it.
Speaker: Again, it's one of them ones that I'm devastated is no longer around, but I can go back and watch the highlights.
Speaker: And one of them that I love going back and watching is the Swerve Strickland now, but at the time he was, oh my God, Killshot.
Speaker: Yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker: So it's the kill shot versus AR Fox.
Speaker: I think it technically wasn't a death match.
Speaker: It was just the three stages of hell.
Speaker: But it's in that realm of like, it goes into more death matchy sort of stuff because there is glass, there is like this elevated sense of violence.
Speaker: And it does help that everything was mic'd up in the Lucha Underground.
Speaker: So every kick sounded like a gunshot.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, and like, even like, who's your underground?
Speaker: The backstory of like, I think AR Fox left Killshot to die in Iraq, and then he's come back for his revenge or whatever.
Speaker: Oh, mind-blowing stuff.
Speaker: But yeah, Vampiro versus Pentagon is another one where
Speaker: Pentagon had become Pentagon Dark and he was going through the roster and he just kept breaking people's arms that was his thing is he'd win the match and then he'd just snap your arm because he's a bad guy and he was saying that he was answering to this like higher power or his like mentor or whatever and then finally Vampiro who was on commentary is like well I'm going to fight you in a death match so you can like
Speaker: you have to stop.
Speaker: And at the end of it... This is your retribution.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They go through this whole death match and he's beating him up and then he finally has him and he's going to kill Vampira, basically.
Speaker: And then it's revealed that Pentagon's mask is ripped open and he's covered in blood.
Speaker: They're both covered in blood.
Speaker: And then it's revealed that Vampira was the master the whole time and he's finally passed the final test.
Speaker: And then Pentagon became good again.
Speaker: I don't know how.
Speaker: really sweet death match yeah yeah i mean you can let the the i guess the believability go for a little bit there when you have a really sick match before it as well but no that's um i didn't really know much about lucha underground either and i didn't realize that they went into that that nth degree in terms of that physicality so um i'll have to do my research a little bit better there and have a look at some lucha underground stuff um
Speaker: We did touch on this because this was the first place.
Speaker: You started at the top of the roller coaster and you started talking about piranhas in tanks and things like that.
Speaker: So I was going to ask you about the most absurd weapon you've seen, but I think that takes the cake.
Speaker: So what about the most absurd weapon that you've used or had used on yourself?
Speaker: So I, again, starting with a Canadian Destroyer as soon as the bell rings, my first death match was I was tagging with Joel Bateman against The Pulse here in Perth for the first No Ring show.
Speaker: The end of the match, I've got Felix Young.
Speaker: I've got his arms behind his back and Joel Bateman appears from the back of the venue with a whippersnapper.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Um, I then proceeded to take a whippersnapper shot to the stomach, which is with all the adrenaline still running, it's still top five, top 10 worst things I've ever done.
Speaker: Absolutely stupid of an idea as it was.
Speaker: Luckily enough in the footage, Joel hits me with it and it hits me a couple of times, but luckily enough, it was an electric whippersnapper.
Speaker: So we'd unplugged, um,
Speaker: So it managed to get me pretty bad, but then it unplugged itself.
Speaker: So it stopped and I was like, thank God, because if I kept going, I might have cried.
Speaker: I didn't want to do that until at least after the match, I was going to cry.
Speaker: Sorry to interrupt, but like, I don't want you to go into trade secrets.
Speaker: I don't want you to go into like the, I don't think for many reasons, one, because there is the performance and the spectacle of it.
Speaker: And two, we definitely don't want anyone listening along going, hey, this might be a good idea to try elsewise.
Speaker: But how does that not, how does that not completely hurt?
Speaker: Like there's no, for want of a better term, using the F word that wrestlers predominantly don't like.
Speaker: You can't fake copying a whippersnapper to the stomach.
Speaker: No, you cannot.
Speaker: I can assure you, as much as you may think I could do that, you can't.
Speaker: Luckily enough, because of personal reasons, I wear a singlet and butcher's
Speaker: when I wrestle.
Speaker: So I had two layers of clothes over the top of where I was getting hit with a whippersnapper.
Speaker: Someone who I know has taken a whippersnapper to his bare back is a wrestler named Dan Steele.
Speaker: And I believe the footage I've seen of him screaming still haunts me.
Speaker: So I feel like the reason we kind of got away with
Speaker: the whippersnapper spot in that regard is because luckily enough, um,
Speaker: Joel wasn't trying to hit me.
Speaker: So, K-Fab, K-Fab.
Speaker: He wasn't trying to hit me.
Speaker: Yeah, of course.
Speaker: So he didn't give it as much welly as he would have hit Felix.
Speaker: But at the same time, again, I had two layers of fabric over my soft gooey center.
Speaker: So that is, I still got like lacerations.
Speaker: I still got cut up a little bit, but it wasn't as severe as if it would have just been on bare skin.
Speaker: Thank Christ.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, no, no, thank you very much.
Speaker: Yeah, you don't want to go out there and you Randy Orton trunks and be doing that despite that awesome 2004 match.
Speaker: That's a great, I love a good I quit match.
Speaker: That's not an I quit match.
Speaker: It's a great hardcore match, but I love a good I quit match.
Speaker: Not been a good one in a while though.
Speaker: No, no, it's a little bit more theatrical now, but it's, you know, as an aside, that match with Auden and Foley, one of my favorite matches of all time, still don't like deathmatch wrestling.
Speaker: Crazy.
Speaker: So whippersnapper, anything, I mean, how do you beat that?
Speaker: I don't think you can, but anything else come to mind that's been, you know, that world of absurd?
Speaker: um the old classic one was i wrestled um jared slate and he put a milk carton on my head and he hit it with a broken piece of door um trying to explain that to people um like what did you do on the weekend i just shown a photo of me with a milk crate on my head and then a giant bear of a man swinging a broken piece of door at me um that sort of um
Speaker: I feel like I've been quite tame so far with the weapons I've used or have used in death matches.
Speaker: Don't like when you say so far because I genuinely do care about you, Jimmy.
Speaker: I'll tell you what.
Speaker: I wrestled...
Speaker: I think the two, the two in Melbourne are coming to my mind now.
Speaker: Cause I'm remembering them.
Speaker: I've blocked them out.
Speaker: I haven't.
Speaker: But I wrestled Vixen over there.
Speaker: Deathmatch legend over, over in Melbourne.
Speaker: And I got the old, it's a classic.
Speaker: It's the old pizza cutter.
Speaker: I got that in the mouth.
Speaker: So like, yeah, the pizza cutter in the mouth.
Speaker: I wrestled Neil Diamond cutter, which was awesome.
Speaker: I wrestled him.
Speaker: in a uh aussie shitstorm death match where basically they just throw buckets of um stuff at you so we had um uh like driveway gravel um sabu tax which uh bear with me we had sabu tax which are barbed wire but you cut off just the pointy bits okay yeah
Speaker: It's a weapon Sabu used to use a lot.
Speaker: So it was that and thumbtacks.
Speaker: We had carpet strips.
Speaker: So basically what you hold carpet down on flooring with.
Speaker: I've had those used against me.
Speaker: And yeah, salt and lemons sucks.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: Salt and lemons are the worst.
Speaker: I reckon that, I was going to say worse than a whippersnapper, but probably not still, but not ideal.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: It's not ideal.
Speaker: As odd as it sounds, I regrettably didn't bleed as much in Melbourne as I would have hoped.
Speaker: So the salt and the lemons weren't too bad.
Speaker: They did get in my eye, which was a bit of a pain.
Speaker: The most dangerous thing in that match was the bucket that Diamond Cutter threw at me, the bastard, because it done my eye in and my eyes swelled up.
Speaker: And I had a black eye trying to fly back to Perth and trying to explain that to my mother when I landed.
Speaker: And she went, what have you done to your eye?
Speaker: And I went, Bucket.
Speaker: And she was not pleased.
Speaker: She was not pleased with Mr. Diamond Cutter in the slightest.
Speaker: No, I doubt she would be.
Speaker: Can we just rewind a little bit there?
Speaker: You mentioned there you didn't bleed as much as you would like to.
Speaker: And I know we haven't really talked about this before, but how important...
Speaker: is the blood aspect of the death match spectacle.
Speaker: I know a lot of mainstream, like WWE obviously move away from using blood now because they don't see that as adding to the product.
Speaker: But how important is it to the death match spectacle to have the visceral image of blood
Speaker: So I had a really good chat with Clint Margera about this, actually.
Speaker: After our match, Clint didn't bleed as much.
Speaker: I was pretty red, as they say.
Speaker: And I feel like it's a thing in a lot of...
Speaker: they are major it's the top promotions in Australia really if they do try and shy away from blood in some aspects come into mind Mitch Waterman versus Buddy Matthews at MCW Buddy's nose not Buddy Mitchie's nose started bleeding yeah
Speaker: And they didn't stop the match.
Speaker: Obviously, I don't think it was on purpose, or if it was, that's really awesome, of all things, to bleed from your nose, because you're so hyped up for this match against such an athlete like Buddy Matthews.
Speaker: The other thing that comes to mind is WrestleRampage.
Speaker: We had Corn Dog versus close personal friend Julian Ward in the ball rope match.
Speaker: And again, Jules opens like a tap when he bleeds.
Speaker: um Taylor King at the most um in the cage match against the Don again got a little bit of blood yeah it's that sort of like if it elevates what you're doing then I feel like it's an acceptable thing to have in the match so when I was talking to Clint about it I was like oh that's like in comparison he didn't bleed as much as I did yeah um his take on it was well I don't mind that much and I went well that's good
Speaker: But the other thing being that in the story of the match, I am on a five-match deathmatch losing streak.
Speaker: Clint Margera is flying over here.
Speaker: Deathmatch legend in the UK.
Speaker: North ultra-violent champion.
Speaker: About to make it a world title.
Speaker: I am the 100% underdog.
Speaker: So the underdog having that moment of fighting from underneath, bleeding completely, like covered in blood.
Speaker: and then trying to fight back.
Speaker: I think it reminds me of like Eddie Guerrero versus CJL.
Speaker: God, I've got Eddie Guerrero.
Speaker: JBL.
Speaker: Shout out CJL.
Speaker: But Eddie Guerrero versus JBL, where Eddie got a little bit too red.
Speaker: But the underdog factor of like, oh my god, this person is like, they're throwing everything they've got into this match.
Speaker: They're literally throwing their blood.
Speaker: They're fighting through all of this pain.
Speaker: That level of like, it's why I do love death matches.
Speaker: It's what attracted me to me in the beginning is like this just unbreakable drive to win.
Speaker: that you'll just throw every single ounce of yourself at your opponent, at whatever is being thrown at you, and you just cop it and you just keep going until you can't keep going anymore.
Speaker: And it is, yeah, that visual of like, like more recently me and, again, me and Felix Young, we have, we had this match that basically,
Speaker: not beknownst to the fans but like on a personal level and sort of like in a career level we've been feuding for years because we've always been so similar so this sort of like it's a level of like hatred that we have for each other because we've always been put as competitors was sort of thrown into that match so again we were both just throwing everything at each other both of us are just like bleeding and it just adds to the whole like
Speaker: spectacle of like oh my god like what like wow that's like next level sort of like it's an additional like factor of storytelling
Speaker: Yeah, big time.
Speaker: And that's why you see it in movies.
Speaker: I mean, if you look at the Rocky films, when their faces have gone more bloodied, swollen and things like that, it does.
Speaker: It adds to that underdog.
Speaker: It adds to that brutality of that contest that's going on.
Speaker: I guess the only difference is when you're watching Rocky, you're going, oh, CGI, makeup, whatever.
Speaker: Probably not CGI, CGI in the 70s, but, you know.
Speaker: But, you know, you're seeing that and, you know,
Speaker: you see all the, um, the exposés on pro wrestling and things like that.
Speaker: And that's not what this show is, but there's a difference between seeing someone who's like, Oh, that's a blood capsule versus, okay, that's the true legit thing.
Speaker: You, you can just feel it in an audience and you just know the difference and, and it gives it that, that, um, that authenticity, authenticity and that, um, yeah, definitely that, uh, that, that spectacle as well.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: With Deathmatch, I mentioned Rocky.
Speaker: Obviously, that's a mainstream movie.
Speaker: Do you think that Deathmatch genre, whether or not it's, I guess, a fully-fledged company or whether the genre itself can go mainstream?
Speaker: You've touched on how AEW, that second biggest promotion, is starting to incorporate it.
Speaker: Can it be embraced by the mainstream wrestling fan?
Speaker: It's...
Speaker: When I talk about deathmatch wrestling, even in a smaller bubble of specifically, dude, where's my ring?
Speaker: This company in Perth.
Speaker: We really define it as a niche within a niche.
Speaker: And it's this... With the mainstream, I feel like it is that... We spoke about it before we started the interview.
Speaker: This different flavors of ice cream...
Speaker: idea of like everyone likes different flavors of ice cream.
Speaker: I remember Marcus Pitt Marcus Pitt or Brett said everyone likes different flavors of ice cream.
Speaker: I like the WWE.
Speaker: Charlie likes throwing himself on the ground.
Speaker: It's that sort of like it is the different flavors of ice cream.
Speaker: I feel like WWE has been doing it for so long in such an accessible way
Speaker: that is like the standard it is very vanilla sort of flavour of ice cream.
Speaker: I feel like Deathmatch is the niche of the niche exactly like comedy wrestling is.
Speaker: Yeah, okay.
Speaker: Like a catch as catch can sort of like
Speaker: very chain heavy, very like shoot style sort of grappling sort of thing.
Speaker: Yeah, very much more like grappling and that sort of stuff.
Speaker: Like a Josh Barnett's Bloodsport.
Speaker: Again, it's like a niche within a niche of like, okay, here is this thing.
Speaker: Here is a completely lower level, like not lower level of it, but here is a very specific subset.
Speaker: That is the only thing we're marketing.
Speaker: And I feel like Deathmatch...
Speaker: can a certain point become mainstream i feel like aew has done a very very good job as much as people on twitter and facebook would have you not believe because um everything is jim cornett um yelling at a camera for some reason um i feel like the
Speaker: I feel like a lot of people, I think that Don, I'm going to speak on behalf of him because I can because he's not here.
Speaker: He would prefer to see death matches used at the end of a long blood feud.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So sort of like a Don and Taylor King, if they were so inclined to do a death match.
Speaker: If that's sort of like the long-term story, like the story of building and they do this match and it doesn't go to plan and they do this match and Don cheats to win and they do this match and then Taylor wins, but he doesn't actually because the referee was knocked out.
Speaker: So they have to do it and they have to settle it.
Speaker: in this match with very few rules yeah and like the the main rule being you have to incapacitate your opponent that's why i'm absolutely loving people doing texas death matches on aew it's not you have to have them incapacitated for or it's like a standing 10 count and then you can beat them i think that was the old rules
Speaker: But now it's just like you can only win by submission or like that's it.
Speaker: It's submission only.
Speaker: Yeah, submission, knockout, like incapacitate, yeah.
Speaker: That sort of thing.
Speaker: So like there's one coming up that I'm, again, so excited for, Swerve Strickland, who was kill shot versus Hangman Page in a Texas death match.
Speaker: Yeah, that's this weekend if you want to date the podcast.
Speaker: I'm going to date this podcast so badly.
Speaker: I'm foaming at the mouth thinking about that match because, again,
Speaker: It's two people who aren't... Hangman has been in Texas Deathmatch.
Speaker: Strickland hasn't been in a Deathmatch in as many years as it's been since Lucha Underground.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because they're in this blood feud, because...
Speaker: because Strickland thinks that Hangman has too many opportunities but then Strickland's taken it too far because he's literally gone to his house and has laid a t-shirt on his sleeping baby child or whatever.
Speaker: And people wonder why wrestling's absurd.
Speaker: It's so good but then it's leading to this like well I want to kill you I'm going to in a death match and that's sort of like I feel like that is the way
Speaker: wrestling as like a mainstream medium is going to accept
Speaker: deathmatch wrestling as a not a regular every single Friday here's a deathmatch yeah it's a here is like this is a mythical thing it's like the Hell in a Cell used to be before they made a fucking pay it's like I'm glad you made that comparison yeah it's like a it's like WWE making a pay-per-view called fucking deathmatch and there's four deathmatches and for some reason and for some reason Roman Reigns is in all four of them like he'd have to show up
Speaker: He'd have to sharpen, he'd have to thin his belt, yeah.
Speaker: So it's one of them sort of things of like, here is, the stakes have been raised because we can't have this in a regular match, so we need to escalate it.
Speaker: So it's like, it was the steel cage back in the 80s.
Speaker: then it was the head in a cell, then it was a TLC, then for a little bit when MVP wrestled The Undertaker, it was an Inferno match.
Speaker: It's like niche reference.
Speaker: It's these very like, at the end of a feud, here is your blow-off.
Speaker: It is a Texas death match.
Speaker: That is the way I feel like
Speaker: deathmatch wrestling can be brought to the mainstream.
Speaker: New Japan is doing Texas deathmatches because of, again, John Knoxley and Lance Archer.
Speaker: They did a Texas deathmatch for the US title.
Speaker: If you can use deathmatch properly and not oversaturate it, and I feel like that's a big problem.
Speaker: Even then, deathmatch promotions are popular.
Speaker: um in very certain ways i feel like the original model of dmdu was a very good example of that you have a separate division which is just deathmatch wrestling you have a separate division which is just your heavyweights and you have a separate division which is your tag teams yeah and if you can build it around that like um big japan pro wrestling big in japan
Speaker: That's a dumb way to phrase that.
Speaker: It's a big promotion in Japan called Big Japan, but they do a lot of death matches.
Speaker: GCW, probably...
Speaker: the new PWG, because PWG has taken a bit of a backseat after COVID and stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Obviously, Super Dragon's partner's sick, so obviously wishing her the best.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But GCW has taken that mantle of being like the top indie, and they do a lot of death matches.
Speaker: Nick Gage,
Speaker: is a big star for them.
Speaker: Matt Cardonia, the formerly Zack Ryder, is again another guy that does death matches.
Speaker: Charlie Evans from Australia, big in the States, does a lot of death matches.
Speaker: Sawyer Wreck, again, Akira, a lot of these people that do death matches, but it's not specifically a promotion just for death matches.
Speaker: You can do that, like ICW No Holds Barred.
Speaker: They do, instead of ropes, they have chains.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So that's sort of like, it's like a blood sport, sort of like fighting in the chains or whatever, that sort of stuff.
Speaker: And that's sort of like how they build their reputation.
Speaker: But again, some, they don't always do nothing but death matches.
Speaker: Yeah, it's about picking the spots and, you know, making things make sense, which I think even for non-death match wrestling companies, you've got to make things make sense.
Speaker: And if it's just the same thing you're spamming over and over and over without rhyme or reason, then that particular promotion or that particular wrestler may not have the same longevity as a company that might space it out and sort of, you know,
Speaker: be able to pull those levers to be able to say, okay, we're going close to the edge here.
Speaker: Let's rein it back.
Speaker: Give people a breather or let up or what have you.
Speaker: So, um, absolutely.
Speaker: Would you say based on that, that at the moment, the death match scene or that little niche, uh, within a niche is, is thriving?
Speaker: Um, I'd say so.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Um, uh, I'm going to, I'm going to speak on again, behalf of people.
Speaker: I feel like, um, with the, the, the dude wears my ring shows here in Perth, I feel like,
Speaker: We've been what was supposed to be just a one off show because some people had gotten behind the idea of doing death match in Perth and no ring stuff.
Speaker: It sort of evolved into its own little beast itself.
Speaker: And I feel like.
Speaker: Given time.
Speaker: everything can grow and everything can get better.
Speaker: Again, like I said, Charlie Evans is big into deathmatch wrestling.
Speaker: He's now over in the States with her husband wrestling across the entire United States, but she's doing deathmatches that she probably couldn't do in Australia.
Speaker: I feel like that's sort of the same deal over here.
Speaker: There is a deathmatch scene.
Speaker: If we can cultivate it, I know DMDU is now under new management or whatever,
Speaker: But if we can cultivate the scene and we can make sure that we're doing it in the right way and we're not just sort of copping out and throwing to people who aren't experienced in there together and then just going, oh, well, and now you can do a death match because you've been wrestling for a year.
Speaker: You have to take into consideration that people train for years to be good professional wrestlers.
Speaker: They want to be safe.
Speaker: They want to take care of their opponent.
Speaker: They want to better the scene.
Speaker: And in doing so, you can do that through the vein of deathmatch wrestling.
Speaker: I've had people, since we started doing the no ring shows, I've had people who have never thought about doing deathmatches before or never considered it being an option have come to me and said, hey, if I do one, I want it to be you.
Speaker: And that is a massive, like... That's a huge favor.
Speaker: It's an absolutely huge favor in my cap because I have such...
Speaker: passion for deathmatch wrestling and for making sure that it's done the right way and it's done in as in quotes as safe as it possibly can be because I want I want it to I want it to thrive and I want it to grow I want to be able to as much as I'm as much as I am a deathmatch wrestler I am a professional wrestler first and foremost before I'm anything else James Hartness is a professional wrestler
Speaker: The deathmatch stuff is a lovely bonus that I can do while still being a good and safe professional wrestler.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's a huge part of it.
Speaker: I think that's why your attitude to deathmatch wrestling is one that I really do respect and why I wanted to chat to you about it because I think you have that awareness and that understanding of just how important it is to be good fundamentally, good safe worker, as they say.
Speaker: And then you're putting the extra accoutrements onto it.
Speaker: With that in mind, as we round the corner here, the last thing I'm just going to ask you on deathmatch wrestling, and we've saved it to the last part of this before we do all the fun stuff about where you're going to be next and where we can find you and what the future holds for Jimmy, is...
Speaker: Me, I'm unsure on deathmatch wrestling.
Speaker: I love wrestling.
Speaker: I'm a big old nerd for it.
Speaker: And, you know, I probably lean more AEW than WWE, but my favorite wrestler is Mick Foley.
Speaker: But for someone like me who might be unsure, a little tentative about checking a deathmatch show out or deathmatch, uh, match online or whatever it may be.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: How would you sell it to someone like me or maybe not specifically me because you'd probably just lure some cheese macaroni on a stick and you'd get me there.
Speaker: But how would you market or sell the idea of a deathmatch show or deathmatch to me or someone like me?
Speaker: so i always um i'm going to touch on a point i brought up earlier is i always like to look at um death match wrestling as especially um the no ring stuff that we've been doing more recently is i like to describe it as like an art is it's a performance art where you can go in there and two people are going in they're using their bodies as the canvas to perform for the audience of people it is it does i feel like it does appeal to like that um
Speaker: the caveman or like Roman era bringing up the Roman Empire but like that coliseum sort of like.
Speaker: You do often think about it.
Speaker: Again, exactly.
Speaker: I think about it more often than not but it is using the human body as a canvas going into these sort of matches and I feel like
Speaker: it's you can you can agree no sorry i'm glad you brought the rocky films because i was trying to think of like how can i how can i associate it with movies and the only thing i could think of was when luke gets his hand cut off in star wars i don't know if that really i don't know if that tracks that that's the whippersnapper going wrong yeah absolutely but um it is i feel like it's that good versus evil it's like i feel like if you're going to watch deathmatch then seek out proper
Speaker: either Japanese death matches or I'm going to say reputable death matches where you can either watch Carnage, you can watch like the Carnage train wreck, like, oh, I can't look away, I'm going to watch it or whatever.
Speaker: Or you can, in my opinion, watching like Dude, Where's My Ring?
Speaker: A lot of our matches are very story-based.
Speaker: It's very much like there is a relatively clear good guy, a clear bad guy, good versus evil, who's going to win?
Speaker: I have a note here.
Speaker: I'm not too sure what the point I was trying to make was.
Speaker: I don't watch dressage at the Olympics.
Speaker: I've seen clips of it, and I'm sure it is very impressive.
Speaker: I would never be able to train a horse to do anything, let alone...
Speaker: for it to do a dance but it's one of them sort of things of like it's i can appreciate that there is a skill in our art form to going in there putting so much on the line that it's just the connection is there with the audience that like
Speaker: That's why I like using more like household based items is like, it's the connection with the audience of like, yeah, you probably aren't going to know what it's like to get curb stomped through a bundle of light tubes.
Speaker: but I'm sure you've accidentally put lemon in a cup and you've gone, oh shit, that really hurts.
Speaker: It's that on like a larger scale of like, oh no, there's a whole lemon in my hand.
Speaker: And now my hand, like my, my hand's been put in like fun tacks or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Where you've accidentally like cut yourself with scissors and you're like, ah, God damn it.
Speaker: But you know, you know what it's like.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When it comes to death matches, like to try and, to try and sell it, I always try and sell it as if I'm doing it,
Speaker: and I'm okay, then there's no reason you can't enjoy it.
Speaker: You don't have to worry for me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Pray for, yeah.
Speaker: Don't cry for me.
Speaker: I'm already dead.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think you've come up with two names for future shows there for you guys.
Speaker: I think Don't Cry For Me, I'm Already Dead, or Don't Cry For Me, I'm Already Deathmatch.
Speaker: Or I think the other one you sort of slipped in there is like When Life Gives You Lemons, just dot, dot, dot.
Speaker: I think...
Speaker: because you've got some pretty funny show names that I've seen pop up on the social.
Speaker: So with that in mind, what sort of future goals have you got for yourself there?
Speaker: And with those future goals, where can we see you work towards them?
Speaker: So yeah, future goals at this point is I want to do a tour of the States and a bit of Canada.
Speaker: I want to go back to the UK for the first time since I was 10 years old.
Speaker: um and then uh japan this is this is death match and non-death match i feel like um i need to hone my craft uh regardless of um whether i'm doing death matches or i'm wrestling as a regular wrestler i suppose um all those sort of things uh yeah those those are always my top three just like america japan the uk are always all those sort of things of like
Speaker: If I'm going to learn more about this world that I'm in, I need to go elsewhere.
Speaker: Again, I would love to go back to Melbourne, love to go to Adelaide to wrestle.
Speaker: I hate Sydney.
Speaker: Even Brisbane, the scene over there is blossoming with people like Bobby Bishop.
Speaker: and um aj history are putting a lot of time over there yeah um and yeah um future stuff coming up uh if you'd like to see me uh don't don't cry for me i'm already dead um we have a um we have the last i'm going to date it really badly i apologize attack on seasonal
Speaker: which is happening on the, I'm going to guess it's the 24th.
Speaker: I'm going to get it wrong and I'm going to get yelled at.
Speaker: It's the 24th.
Speaker: Banger.
Speaker: Look at me go.
Speaker: On the 24th of November.
Speaker: And then I will be under the bright lights of Willerton stadium for EPW reawakening on December 16th.
Speaker: And I'm wrestling three people that I wish I spoke about more in this, but it wasn't about regular wrestling.
Speaker: I'm wrestling Solomon Blackwell,
Speaker: Alex Kingston and Robbie Hart for the very, very coveted EPW Invitational Tournament trophy, which again is the money in the bank equivalent of EPW, gets you a title shot whenever you'd like.
Speaker: Those are my two coming up.
Speaker: Obviously, we've got a big weekender next year with Elimination Chamber coming to Perth.
Speaker: There's various bits and bobs.
Speaker: There's the EPW Super Show on the Friday beforehand.
Speaker: Dude Where's My Ring is running a two-nighter at Seasonal on the Friday and a Saturday matinee show.
Speaker: And then, yeah, I'll be mostly EPW and Dude Where's My Ring based over the next year or so.
Speaker: Hopefully you'll see me in Melbourne, Adelaide.
Speaker: If you listen to this and you like wrestling, tell people that you'd like to see me in your state other than New South Wales.
Speaker: I hope you get booked there because everyone will hate you and you'll hate being there.
Speaker: It's just win-win.
Speaker: Misery loves company.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a busy six months coming up for pro wrestling, especially here in Western Australia.
Speaker: We spoke about it with Bailey from Optus Stadium earlier on in our run so far about how exciting that's going to be to have WWE here in Perth as well.
Speaker: But what about yourself specifically?
Speaker: What are the socials?
Speaker: Where can people find you and jump on and be, I guess, look into your life there on the social media?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, I am on every social media at JamesHartnessPW for Pro Wrestler.
Speaker: I'm on that on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Speaker: Stream EPW on Vimeo.
Speaker: There's free matches on YouTube as well.
Speaker: Watch Dude Where's My Ring on YouTube.
Speaker: All of my matches so far are up there apart from the most recent one, which should be going up soon.
Speaker: Drink Brutalibre, Drink Seasonal Brewing Company.
Speaker: I'm paid to say those.
Speaker: I was going to say, you just slip those in.
Speaker: You're supposed to slip those in and throw me a card in while you say it.
Speaker: If you're going to start, this is cash for comments now, is it?
Speaker: Yeah, well, I get paid in beer, so I just do it every now and again and hope they keep paying me in beer.
Speaker: Yeah, I am about the place.
Speaker: I usually post stupid things on Instagram.
Speaker: My Twitter is more professional wrestling, and sometimes I remember I have a Facebook, if you're lucky.
Speaker: I don't think many people remember they have a Facebook these days unless they need to jump onto a community page.
Speaker: You have a MySpace, do you?
Speaker: No, you know what?
Speaker: I could see you typing in mixed upper and lowercase letters.
Speaker: I could see that.
Speaker: And with your black and white skin.
Speaker: Uppercase X, lowercase X, Jimmy Hartness underscore raw, uppercase, lowercase X. Yeah, I'm all about it.
Speaker: I'm bringing it back.
Speaker: I've decided right now I'm bringing MySpace back.
Speaker: I don't think you can.
Speaker: I think I tried to jump onto my space.
Speaker: I can do whatever I want, mate.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: No, there we go.
Speaker: The black gloves back out.
Speaker: Thanks so much for having a chat.
Speaker: It's been good to catch up.
Speaker: Any final words there for our listening viewership before we let you go?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to me ramble about this very silly niche within a niche that I do.
Speaker: And if you excuse me, I need to go and pick up all these names I've dropped this entire interview.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It has been a very heavy name drop episode, but I think there has been a lot to get out of it as well in terms of not only a glimpse into the world of professional wrestling with the first part of the conversation and guess how you get involved with it and sort of your fandoms, even if it is West Ham.
Speaker: I'm surprised you didn't slip more British Bulldog in it.
Speaker: Oh, it was because we didn't circle back to wrestlers.
Speaker: I had British Bulldog.
Speaker: I had Big Daddy.
Speaker: I had Giant Haystacks.
Speaker: I was all over it.
Speaker: I had Finn Finley, I had William Regal, Dave Taylor.
Speaker: I was all over it.
Speaker: British wrestlers now.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm going to list all the British people I know.
Speaker: Starting with A. No.
Speaker: So, no, really, thank you very much for your time.
Speaker: It's been a fascinating insight into the deathmatch scene and that form of professional wrestling as well.
Speaker: I'm still reeling from Piranha Tanks.
Speaker: Oh, the Piranha Tanks.
Speaker: I'm bringing it to Perth, I reckon.
Speaker: Is there Piranhas in Perth?
Speaker: I'll find them.
Speaker: Yeah, good luck with that.
Speaker: Oh, didn't even get to the Crocodile Deathmatch.
Speaker: Oh, man, we've got to do this again.
Speaker: I think that's a pretty good, that's a pretty good teaser to leave us on.
Speaker: So James, thank you so much.
Speaker: And if you're not on a work computer or device at the moment, have a look at crocodile death match, but James Hartness, thanks so much for your time.
Speaker: It's been an absolute blast, mate.
Speaker: Cheers, mate.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Just an incredible interview and an incredibly long interview.
Speaker: So thank you very much for sticking around and keeping us in your ear holes all that time.
Speaker: But it was one of those conversations that just organically just kept on throwing up things that were just so interesting.
Speaker: So I didn't want to cut it short.
Speaker: I didn't want to cut Jimmy short.
Speaker: So, you know, again, a little bit longer than our usual run time.
Speaker: But, wow, what a heck of a niche within a niche, as James said there, in terms of...
Speaker: piranhas and crocodiles and whippersnippers oh my so um definitely uh make sure you follow him on the socials there and uh you know jimmy's such a charismatic bloke as well if death match wrestling if you haven't been able to have your arm twisted and it's probably a scary thing to say there given the uh the magnitude pop pop of those sort of uh weaponry in that that you know arm twist might actually be quite a lethal thing but
Speaker: He also does wrestle at other companies that don't necessarily dive deep into the death match circuit.
Speaker: You know, you've probably, you know, being a fan of the show or hate listening, so thank you for that anyway.
Speaker: It still helps the numbers.
Speaker: We very much need to boost those numbers.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: He wrestles for other companies there that don't dive deep into that death match.
Speaker: Things like EPW, Perth, which I know that they've got their big show in December this year and also a super show in Perth, February next year.
Speaker: That's going to combine a lot of the Australian wrestling greats just before WWE bring their massive production, that is Elimination Chamber, to Optus Stadium, which is bound to be a good time even though
Speaker: I hate Optus Stadium and Optus Stadium hates me.
Speaker: So we'll leave it there for today.
Speaker: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker: It's a big week coming up.
Speaker: Touched on it at the top of the show there.
Speaker: We've got the Cricket World Cup coming up.
Speaker: So go Australia.
Speaker: We've got the AFL Draft, which I'm a big nuffy for.
Speaker: Just seeing all these 18-year-old kids who I've got no idea who they are.
Speaker: I'm pretending that I know the ins and outs of their game.
Speaker: Thanks to...
Speaker: Kevin Shifter Sheehan on all the AFL media.
Speaker: And because I'm a nerd, I don't know if you've picked this up, but because I'm a nerd, we've got Doctor Who returning with the best doctor of all time, David Tennant as well.
Speaker: So a busy week.
Speaker: Next week on our show, the stuff you probably care about rather than, you know, my random musings, is we got from going in front of the camera back to behind the camera with a fascinating guest from...
Speaker: the East Coast of Australia, well, originally from the West Coast, involved in the basketball world.
Speaker: So stay tuned.
Speaker: That's going to be a really great interview and going to learn a lot from that as well.
Speaker: So as always, if you've liked what we've done or got any feedback, constructive or otherwise, please hit me up on DM.
Speaker: You can hit us on Instagram at heypaluncoachable on X.com.
Speaker: You can hit us up on HeyPalPod.
Speaker: Also, I've got the Gmail gimmick as well.
Speaker: So HeyPalI'mMailable at gmail.com as well.
Speaker: So really have appreciated all the feedback that's come through, all the nice words, all the not-so-nice words, because I do learn from them.
Speaker: In the real world, I'm all about learning and development.
Speaker: So yeah, anything that you have to...
Speaker: provide us in the way of things that you might think make the show a little bit better or that you want us to keep on doing, yeah, please let us know because without you, my loyal listening viewership, this show doesn't exist.
Speaker: I mean, otherwise it's just a random man talking in his spare room, hopefully not disturbing his housemate too early on a Saturday morning.
Speaker: Thank you very much for being part of it.
Speaker: And also, if you have liked what we're doing and you like the interviews and like just the vibes of the show, I don't know.
Speaker: I think I'm too old to say vibes.
Speaker: But if you like the vibes of the show, please rate us on your streaming platform.
Speaker: It does help the boffins with the algorithms and all that sort of thing.
Speaker: Helps get our show onto more earbuds.
Speaker: And yeah, and you know,
Speaker: Share it as well.
Speaker: You know, we've got 10 million social media presences, just a little bit less than myself personally.
Speaker: Please, yeah, give us a shareski.
Speaker: You know, let your mates, your friends, your enemies, people on the street, maybe not people on the street, but just let them know we exist.
Speaker: And yeah, just, you know, just keep listening.
Speaker: You know, I'm just grateful that if you've come through two hours of talking about light tubes and still can't get over the piranhas, that you're liking what we're doing.
Speaker: And I appreciate that you're tuning in each week when people aren't sick to welcome me into your weekly podcast rotation.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Despite saying this would be brief, I have babbled on longer than a filibuster.
Speaker: So we're going to leave it there.
Speaker: Thanks so much.
Speaker: And we will see you next week on Hey Pal, I'm Coachable.
