Canadian wrestling star Speedball Mike Bailey joins Spencer Love to discuss his Twitch channel, wrestling in Shrek cosplay, regaining his ability to travel to the United States, Veda Scott, the Canadian pro wrestling scene, and more. 

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HIGHLIGHTS

Wrestling in Shrek cosplay (14:51)

SL: “Well, and it’s definitely something that you’ve done at least once in your career and one of my favorite things that I’ve watched! Tell me about your experience wrestling your Shrek!”

MB: “Yeah, that was the dumbest thing! I just made – okay. I make a lot of really, really dumb tweets. Most of them are so dumb that they’re not even worse worth tweeting, and they just live out in my drafts, and I show them to my partner, Veda Scott, and I just show them the tweets and they just go ‘haha, that’s funny. You can’t tweet that,’ and then it just dies. I wrote one that was, the tweet was just ‘if this gets 2,000 likes, I’ll wrestle in full Shrek cosplay,’ or something. And it was like, ‘haha, tweet it.’ And then, I did, and then it rapidly got more likes than I had asked. I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll do it. I don’t care.’ “

“There was this place called Good Wrestling in England. They were like, ‘Hey, we saw your tweet, and we know you’re you’re booked on this show. You should do the Shrek match!'”

SL: “’We’ll book you as Shrek?!’ What a fantastic phone call to receive!”

MB: “Right?”

SL: “Are we going to see it again?”

MB: “I have no idea. No clue. I have no plans to wrestler as Shrek again, I have no concrete idea of when that could or could not happen. It might! I mean, if people ask for it, I wouldn’t be opposed.”

Where opportunities lie for Canadian professional wrestlers (20:20)

SL: “I do want to ask, though, you’ve talked about traveling a ton, you have traveled a ton. Do you think that might be the biggest opportunity for Canadian professional wrestlers? You’re pretty unique, for better or for worse, as far as how you’ve had to approach your career. A lot of people talk about where the opportunities do lie for Canadian professional wrestlers, and that seems to be one of the things that people have brought up for me a lot. So, maybe do you see that as the biggest chance that Canadians have to break their names out there a little more? Is that something as not simple, but as obvious, I guess, as hopping on Twitch and doing things like you’re doing? Or, where could that possibly change?”

MB: “I don’t know. I have no idea. Once wrestling in Canada starts happening regularly again, it’s all going to be so different. And, who knows how traveling is going to happen when, or if, that is ever possible in the same way again. Also, the situation with getting a contract and a work visa in the United States is completely different now from what it was five years ago, where there’s a lot more opportunities now and there’s a lot more people being signed.”

“Also, just like you mentioned, the internet is completely different now than it was one year ago, before the pandemic. Things like Twitch, and also, studio wrestling is a lot more accepted now and is going to be a lot more of a viable option to get eyes on you internationally because the wrestling community has accepted that to be a thing that’s happening now, and it’s probably going to keep happening, or at least I hope keeps happening. But, it’s again, right now, given that I have no idea how anything is happening or is going to happen, it’s a very difficult question to answer.”

“The only thing I can say with certainty is that no matter where you are, whether it’s Canada, or anywhere else where you’re in a slightly more difficult situation than if you’re, let’s say, just training in the United States and in the right parts of the United States, is that you need to compare yourself on an international level. So many wrestlers that are from smaller wrestling scenes make the mistake of comparing themselves with the other people on their local scene. I guess it’s nice if you’re the best out of your 30 peers, that’s a good thing. But, where do you rank internationally? That’s a completely different thing.”

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