TJ Wilson was rightfully known as one of the most talented in-ring competitors in the world throughout his time competing inside the squared circle. Whether as a singles competitor or as a member of various factions or tag teams, it seemed as though Wilson could find chemistry with anyone either with him or across the ring from him.

Wilson joined me recently to discuss his love of working with the likes of Cesaro, the New Day, and, of course, the Hart Dynasty throughout his time with WWE. He also talked about his role as a producer for WWE and what it entails in a professional wrestling sense.

On the role of a producer in professional wrestling:

TJ: “So, the role of a producer is to kind of look at the show, kind of give our takes on what we see, and that’ll be prior to the production meeting. Then, we kind of get assigned our matches and our segments, and then we – I like to go and collaborate with talent, and we put together what we see on TV every Monday and Friday. It’s a team effort with everybody. With the talent, with the producers, with the writers, everybody. So, it’s a cool atmosphere that I enjoy backstage.”

How his role has changed with the COVID-19 pandemic:

TJ: “It’s definitely changed a lot of things. Wrestling, at its core, is all about fan and audience participation and fan interaction live in that Arena. Live in that bingo hall, live in that gymnasium, whatever it is, man, I’ve wrestled in all of them. It’s definitely an interesting thing to not have that audience out there, but in this moment, we’re not able to. So, the options are that we either just don’t have shows, or we do and there’s not a fan base present live in the stadium, the crowd. But, it’s definitely different, it’s definitely different.”

TJ: “In terms of changing my role, not really, because I think our talent, and I’m not just saying this, the talent that I work with is so good that I don’t have to – I just have to kind of remind them like ‘hey guys, obviously we don’t have a crowd here, so there’s a tendency to maybe to do things a little quicker, but you gotta just be the pros that you are.’ Our talent are just such pros across the board that it hasn’t been an issue in terms of that for me.”

The differences in preparation between working with a long-time faction like the Hart Dynasty versus working with someone like Cesaro for the first time:

TJ: “Man, that is a great question. That’s awesome. It is true, man, it’s so different. It’s so different. My very first match in July 1995 is teaming with Harry. So, when you fast-forward 15 years, and we win the WWE Tag Team titles together, it’s – obviously, that’s so insanely special, but it’s almost not that foreign. I’ve been wrestling with this guy, either against him or teamed with him, ever since I’d ever been in wrestling.”

SL: “Yeah. Not to bury it, but like, you’ve done it before, y’know?”

TJ: “Yeah. I’ve done so much stuff with him. And, so, it’s funny. I said this on the Bump a couple months ago when they asked me, and I said the difference – a big difference was me. A big difference was me. In 2010, I’m not the performer, I’m not the complete – not that I’m this complete performer, but I’m not as complete a performer in 2010 as I was in 2015. Not even close. So, in 2009, 2010, when I’m first on the main roster and we’re a team? Well, he’d been on the main roster before, but now he’s getting his footing there, like, we’re both kind of finding – and, y’know, along with Nattie as well, we’re both finding our way on the main roster, and we’re doing it together and as a group and collectively. Where, when you fast-forward to 2015, where I’m paired with Cesaro randomly – well, technically December 2014, December 1st we get thrown together on RAW – we’d had a triple-threat match a few weeks prior with Dolph Ziggler. I’d wrestled Cesaro a couple times on some live events, Smackdown, a couple RAW’s I think, NXT, and I had a lot of respect for him, a ton of respect. Not had, have, but I did at that time, too. I think it honestly, it’s on me, and I’m just more of a complete performer myself in 2015 than 2010. But, it just was interesting the chemistry that Cesaro and I had from the beginning.”

If he knew the plan for himself and Cesaro before the partnership ended:

TJ: “No, honestly. If I did, I’d have no problem sharing. I honestly don’t know anything in terms of long-term plans. I know when we lost the titles at Extreme Rules to the New Day in Chicago – which, that’s where I lost my tag titles with Harry as well, so there’s something about that building. No, those are amazing fans, I loved wrestling there, but I apparently can’t hold on to my tag titles there. That day, what I will say, that day I remember Cesaro and I wanted to go meet with Vince because we just wanted to get a grasp on where everything was going, and a lot of people came out of the meeting and they told us that the idea was we would be, we would kind of be the tag team, like the nucleus in the middle, and everybody would kind of work around us, through us. So, I don’t know. At least in April 2015, May, in that area, that was the plan. Those New Day matches were so much fun. Man, when I was home hurt, watching New Day, like how much – especially in like 2015, 2016, 2017, I was like ‘man, I want to be part of this New Day. I was a part of it. I want to be a part of this so bad.’”

TJ: “There was the one time that we (came) back after the 2-out-of-3 falls match in Extreme Rules in Baltimore, and I thought Vince was maybe gonna get mad at something, because he has a very good eye for this, and sometimes, something – you can do a 30-minute match, but something stuck out in his mind at minute six, and he can’t let it go, and you’re gonna hear about it when you get back. I remember we get back, and I thought the match was very good. He’s like ‘y’know, I’m going to have to start charging you guys!’ And I was like ‘oh, man, are we getting fined for something? What’d I do?’ And then, he was talking to New Day, and he was like ‘you guys are having way too much fun wrestling these guys,’ and points to me and Cesaro. I was like ‘yeah. I’ll take it!’”

SL: “That’s a good problem to have!”

TJ: “Yeah, hell yeah. I loved it. I loved every minute of it.”

Please credit Spencer Love/Love Wrestling with any transcriptions used. 

Few Albertans have impacted the province’s independent wrestling scene as much as TJ Wilson has. Whether it be through his own exploits with the legendary Stampede Wrestling, the Prairie Wrestling Alliance or training some of Western Canada’s current top stars, Wilson’s influence on the province is not only immeasurable today, but will be for decades to come.

Wilson and I chatted recently about breaking in with Stampede Wrestling, as well as his training of Albertan wrestling stars Michael Richard Blais, Brandon Van Danielson, and Alex Plexis.

On breaking in with his home-town promotion, Stampede Wrestling

Spencer Love: “Now, let’s get back to yourself as a professional wrestler, and let’s take it all the way back. Obviously, I mentioned right off the bat (you) wrestling for Stampede Wrestling, wrestling for the PWA. Just right off the bat, as an Albertan yourself, as someone who grew up here watching the wrestling scene, did it mean a little bit extra for you to break in with Stampede Wrestling?

I guess the comparison I’d make is it’d be like an Edmontonian getting drafted by the Oilers.

TJ Wilson: “That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. It was very interesting that – so, I loved wrestling. I really liked wrestling, I’ll take that back, I really liked wrestling when I was a young kid, but I was not – my cousin showed it to me, and then I wanted to emulate some of the moves on my sisters, and then wrestling got banned in my house at a very young age.

Fast forward a few years, and I go to school with Teddy Hart, and we were in the same class. He kept inviting me over to his house, which he called a gym, and when you’re a kid, the only gym you really know of is like a gymnasium where you play sports in school. So, finally, I give in and say ‘okay, I’ll come over,’ and I go to his house and he lived in a – his dad owned a gym, BJ’s Gym. He lived, the family lived in (the) quarters above the gym. So, he lived in a workout gym, which was mind-blowing to see at that age. Next thing you know, I’m going up to Stu’s (Hart’s) for Sunday dinner, and here’s Bret Hart, and here’s Owen Hart, and here’s Davey Boy (Smith), and here’s Jim Neidhart. It’s like ‘wha – what? I see these guys on TV, what’s going on?’ I just became engulfed in all aspects of it, in wrestling and in the Hart Family.

TJ: “I mean, to wrestle in Stampede, and especially that one year that Stampede Wrestling was back on TV in ’99-2000, that was such a cool thing because Stampede had gone off the air in ’89, and now here we were ten years later in ’99 restarting Stampede Wrestling TV. Things like that were very, very cool milestones in my career.”

Being a part of such a talented group of wrestlers in Alberta at that time

TJ: “I tried to. I try to live in the moment. It’s obviously a little – sometimes we don’t always see exactly what’s in front of us and we’re always looking ahead. And that’s all of us, and I’m as guilty (of) that as anybody. But, I tried to immerse myself and slow down and enjoy what was in front of me. I remember, for example, you bring up Chucky, Michael Richard Blais, and BVD, I remember saying like ‘hey,’ – so, there was a little break, and then Stampede Wrestling restarted in the fall of 2005, and I remember saying ‘hey, I want these kids that I’ve been training, I want them at ringside almost like New Japan with the Young Boys.’ I’d been going to New Japan at that time, and I was like ‘I want them kind of down there.

’

TJ: “In my mind I knew, I thought I knew what I was creating. I ended up creating (a) way bigger thing than I had bargained for.”

SL: “As usually is want to happen.”

TJ: “Yes. In my mind, I was like ‘okay. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna sneak these guys on to shows here and there and get them that experience.’ And they were young, 16, 17. But that was the same – I had my first match at 15, so I understood that you could. If you’re a kid, I felt, and someone kind of helped you along and kind of gave you a bit of your first break, you will never forget that.”

TJ: “I remember telling the guys that I was meeting with about that, and I said ‘if we use these kids once in a while – we don’t have to put them on shows if you feel that’s going to take away credibility from other things, that’s cool. But, if we use them sporadically, these guys will never forget. And, you know, believe it or not, we don’t have a giant budget, so we need people to come set up the ring and do stuff like that. These guys will come down, and they’ll be in that Ogden Legion all day long doing whatever you want them to do. They’ll set up the ring so they can get in the ring in the day and get some reps in. They did agree, hesitantly, but they did agree and I had an idea that maybe it was a triple-threat with Michael Richard Blais, who was Chucky at the time, BVD, and Plexis. I think it was like a triple threat, and I said ‘hey, here’s the thing, it can go 30 seconds, it can go four minutes, it doesn’t matter, and then Duke (Durrango) and Rik Viktor come and attack these kids and get heat for beating up, bumping around these kids.’ That’s was what I kind of sold them on, and everyone was cool with it. But then, you fast-forward, like, this is going ahead, but then you fast forward six, seven months, the most over guy on our shows was Chucky. I had no clue what I was getting myself into, but I knew these guys were really good, and I knew they wanted to get even better, and I knew they would – I was training them at the time, so I knew how hard these guys wanted to train and I knew how serious, how serious they took wrestling and how much they loved it.”

What he saw in Michael Richard Blais, Brandon Van Danielson, and Alex Plexis

TJ: “It was something funny, I came home from England in 2005, and I was home for two weeks. I’d been in England for four months, almost five months, then I was home for two weeks and I was going to Japan for the Best of the Super Juniors tour. I had like two weeks in between, and I was like trying to just get in shape, and I was training (with) my Japanese in the mornings, and then I would come in at night, and these guys were there training. I was like ‘okay.’ I said ‘hey, guys. I have two weeks right now, but when I come back from Japan if you guys are still here – I see you guys all the time, and you guys…’”

TJ: “I’d come in and I would do stuff. I knew who they were, but I wasn’t essentially training them hands-on at this point. I’d see something and say ‘hey, try this. Hey, try it like this.’ Chucky had been around for a while, he’d been around since he was a kid. Brandon, I kind of knew online or whatever, now he started coming around, and Plexis as well. So they trained with me a little bit during those two weeks, and then I said ‘hey guys, when I come home, if you guys are serious about this, let’s seriously train.’”

TJ: “I came home from Japan, and I was like ‘okay guys, so this is what I do with my Japanese trainer. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m not gonna be – you guys are kids, I’m not gonna be super hard on you, but I’m not gonna take it easy also, so we’ll find that balance.’ Man, those kids showed up every day and they trained hard every day. Right away, I was like ‘okay, this is really fun,’ and I think at that time maybe, I think maybe we were training twice a week, or three times and we bumped it up to four or five, because I was loving it. You started seeing, like, these guys were just, they were these young sponges that just, they absorbed everything. Every day at practice, they would just be that much better, as silly as that sounds, they were just so much better every day. I loved being a part of that. It inspired me to keep getting better, too, and not just kind of stagnate.”

Please credit Spencer Love/Love Wrestling with any transcriptions used. 

There may not be an individual more associated with Major League Wrestling than Mance Warner. In just over a year with the promotion, the Southern Psycho has endeared himself to even the most casual fan of the promotion for both his boundless charisma and his ability to get it done inside the squared circle.

Recently, Warner joined us on the Conversations With Love podcast to discuss wrestling against MJF in front of no fans, why he feels he stands out in MLW and what he loves about the promotion among other topics.

Wrestling against MJF in a Loser Leaves MLW match in front of no one:

“See, it’s a whole ‘nother ball game right there, because like you said, my favourite thing is to go and do the fights, do the shows, the events. Right now, we ain’t got a lot of that going on, so to go out there in front of what I’m used to as a big ol’ crowd, and there ain’t no crowd out there. You ain’t got the people to pull from to get that energy, so you’ve gotta kinda just go out there and remember that they’re going to be watching this, and they’re rooting for you, and you’ve gotta put on a fight that they’re going to appreciate.”

Why he feels he stands out in MLW:

“I think, for me – and like you were saying, that roster’s stacked, man. You can look through that entire roster and from the top to the bottom, everybody in there brings something different to the table. It reminds me of old-school ECW. I think the MLW shows, there’s sometimes people that don’t watch it, and then I’ll tell some fan that don’t know about MLW yet, I’ll say ‘hey, go watch this show.’”

“I’ll always hear that. I’ll always hear ‘man, it’s one-hour long, from the beginning to the end there’s always something going down.’ There ain’t no bulls**t in it. The backstage promos are always fun and it goes to something else that’s going to happen, and they enjoy it. I never hear anyone watch it and say ‘I hated that damn show.

’”

What he loves about working for MLW:

“Out there, they let Ol’ Mancer do what Ol’ Mancer does. You know what I mean? Ain’t nobody gonna tell Ol’ Mancer ‘do this or do that.’ I show up, and I go out there and I get to do the same thing that I do at any show that you come and see. No matter what company it is, if you know Ol’ Mancer’s going to be there, you know what you’re going to get. Out at MLW, they’ve let me do barbed-wire matches. They’ve let me do empty-arena fights. They’ve let me do backstage. I go out there and there’s always something different going down that you get to see Ol’ Mancer doing something different in a different environment with different people.

It’s fun to watch a fight, man, that’s what I always say.”

Please credit Spencer Love/Love Wrestling with any transcriptions used. 

Few professional wrestlers in recent memory have encapsulated fans quite like Mance Warner. Ol’ Mancer has earned a reputation as not only one of pro wrestling’s most badass brawlers, but also one of it’s most charismatic stars. His ability to captivate people both in the ring and on the microphone has earned him comparisons to some of the biggest names in professional wrestling.

Warner recently joined me to discuss a wide variety of topics, including the importance of authenticity in pro wrestling, why he feels he’s been successful thus far, and dealing with comparisons to the likes of Dusty Rhodes and Stone Cold Steve Austin.

The importance of authenticity in pro wrestling:

“Now, I can’t speak for nobody else. My thing has always been I ain’t going to bulls**t nobody. I ain’t going to lie to nobody. If I get hurt, I’m going to tell people ‘hey, I’m hurt.’ I ain’t going to bulls**t nobody. But, for me, once you lie to the fans, to the people that are spending their money to come see this, you’ve already lost them.

At the end of the day, you wouldn’t want to get lied to, I wouldn’t want to get lied to, so why would you want to lie to the fans out there that are spending their money that they’ve gotta work for every day to put a little bread in our pocket? I ain’t going to want to break bread with somebody if they’re lying to me, so I try to always be honest, I try to always call it right down the middle and let people know what’s going on.”

Comparisons to major names in professional wrestling:

“The way Ol’ Mancer looks at is is, we all get into pro wrestling, even maybe you’re just a fan. Maybe you want to become a writer (in) pro wrestling. Maybe you want to be a camera guy. Maybe you want to be a talent. Whatever it may be, we all get into it for a certain reason, right?

We can all remember at some point when we were kids the things we loved about pro wrestling. For me, it was Arn Anderson, Ric Flair, Macho Man, Dusty Rhodes, Terry Funk, Jake the Snake, all these guys that you could sit there and listen to them, and you forget you’re even watching wrestling. You’re just listening to someone tell a story about how he is gonna beat someone’s ass or whatever it may be.

“You can’t ever forget that once you’re into pro wrestling, because that’s the stuff – I didn’t get into pro wrestling to do cool moves. I got into pro wrestling because I like fighting people anywhere I go, and I like telling stories. So, if I can sit down and talk to you and pay attention without even doing anything, right there, here we go baby. It’s that thing of it’s not relying on, because I think the way you worded it was relying on something the past, you’ve got to remember how it all got to this point. So, while other guys are trying to do the craziest thing over here, I’m gonna be over here dancing in the circle doing everything. It’s just kind of take your own spin on it, and then beat the hell out of people and tell some stories in between.”

What he feels has allowed him to succeed thus far:

“I think anyone that gets into something new, right, they always have doubts. They always question things. I never did that, though. Once I got into pro wrestling, I knew ‘this is the thing that I’m going to do, and if I don’t make it at this, I’m f**ked, I’m s**t out of luck.’ For me, it’s going ‘okay, this is the thing you’ve always wanted to do, here we go, this is how you get into it, this is where you need to go.

’ And then, just keep going. Keep going to companies, keep getting your name out there, keep busting your ass. Do what other people don’t want to do. People don’t want to do promos, I’m doing promos every week. I’m always doing promos. People don’t want to tweet stuff out all the time, I’m always tweeting out s**t.”

Please credit Spencer Love/Love Wrestling with any transcriptions used.