Grapplers on the ropes

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This article was published 28/05/2020 (1984 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Local pro wrestler Danny Warren would be the first to admit his profession has taken him to some strange places.

He’s wrestled in a barn with livestock, inside shopping malls, on a beach at a music festival, in the middle of a downtown Winnipeg street, and even at a kid’s birthday party.

But Warren, who wrestles under the name (Hotshot) Danny Duggan, never imagined he’d perform on any show, let alone his company’s biggest one of the year, inside an empty warehouse on the corner of Logan and Arlington with no fans in attendance.

To mark the 11th anniversary of Canadian Wrestling’s Elite, a promotion run by Warren, the company had originally planned a tour across six provinces that featured 36 shows in 36 nights, topped off with a three-hour special in Winnipeg that was going to take place last week at the Holy Eucharist Parish Centre and air on Shaw TV.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic made running a wrestling show, never mind a countrywide tour, more impossible than eliminating Andre the Giant from a battle royal. Warren was forced to pull the plug and now he, and his roster of ring warriors, will be streaming their anniversary show, featuring a tag-team tournament, from their training centre on Facebook Live Friday at 8 p.m. for free. To help offset the financial damage from the lost tour, CWE is encouraging fans to make donations.

“With the way things are looking, by the time we’re gonna be able to do an event again, we’ll be closer to our 12th anniversary than our 11th,” Warren said this week.

“We want to make sure we had one on the books as it’s a monumental event each year. At the same time, the company is still in a position where we’re trying to overcome the debt that COVID has put us in. With 36 events, we’ve been planning this thing since last year. We’ve got tens of thousands of dollars that were invested into this tour in terms of promotional material, shipping, flights and just different arrangements that go into booking a tour of this size that we’re now no longer able to recoup… We’re in a situation where we’re in a big financial ruin because of the COVID lockdown. So, we’re trying to use this as an opportunity to help recoup some of those costs so we can continue operating and building this company.”

The other promotions in town, Winnipeg Pro Wrestling and Premier Championship Wrestling, have also been put into a full nelson by the pandemic. WPW broke onto the scene last year and was consistently selling out shows at the Sherbrook Inn. They were gearing up to make their debut at the West End Cultural Centre on March 19 and were bringing in several wrestlers from the U.S., but co-founder Devin Bray and his team had no choice but to postpone. Bray said it will be incredibly challenging to create the same environment for fans and wrestlers during the pandemic.

“It’s kind of bizarre to look at videos and photos from before (the pandemic) and see how close strangers were. They were on top of each other screaming and now we couldn’t even imagine doing something like that,” Bray said.

“We want to be really mindful of the fans and wrestlers’ expectations of what a WPW show is. We are thinking about (an outdoor event), but we’ve all been to wrestling shows where it’s a 25-person crowd and the energy isn’t the same as a 300-person crowd.”

For PCW, the pandemic made them miss out on celebrating a major milestone. PCW had to axe its 18th-anniversary showdown, which was set for April 18th at their home venue, Doubles Fun Club inside the Travelodge on Alpine Avenue. Starting June 1, bars such as Doubles Fun Club will be allowed to open at half capacity with seats separated by at least two metres. It would definitely be different, but PCW owner Andrew Shallcross said they could make it work under those rules. But when it comes to social distancing inside the squared circle, that’s a whole different story.

“We can have hand sanitizer and clean our ring, but you can’t clean a ring in between each match. You just can’t. It’d be a 20-hour show,” Shallcross said.

“It’d have to be a scenario where we start out with clean products and then make it through an event. If the government allows that, we’ll certainly do that. If they want us to take some precautions, we’ll do that as well and if we have to wait, we have to wait.”

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31