Anticipation runs through the excited crowd like minnows in a stream. The air is thick with the smell of four-dollar beer. All eyes are on the ring, chairs positioned around it like pews around the altar. More than half the audience is standing, crowding the available space in the at-capacity Cambie Street Legion. Max Mitchell enters the ring to devoted cheers. He welcomes each and every person to BOOM! Pro Wrestling. He smiles as the audience joins him in cheering, “THIS! IS! REAL!”
Professional wrestling, inspired by the Greco-Roman style, gained notoriety in the United States, Mexico, and Japan between the ‘40s and the ‘60s. These were the decades of the all-time greats: Gorgeous George, Rikidōzan and the legendary El Santo. The advent of public television helped push wrestling from underground local scenes to a national broadcasting scale. The 1980s saw much of the sport fall under the banner of the World Wrestling Federation, now World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Wrestling hit the mainstream and launched an industry valued at roughly 1.4 billion dollars in revenue in 2024.
Wrestling is one of the most interesting ways we have to tell a story. The match inside the four ropes is both colosseum and stage. The wrestlers establish characters that give each hit and tumble a sense of narrative. If you just want to watch people fight, go to a martial arts tournament. If you want to watch larger-than-life characters resolve weeks, months or even decades-long stories, watch wrestling.
Each match is a vignette in a wrestler’s career-spanning narrative which informs and progresses their evolution. BOOM!’s regulars are perfect examples. Take POWERCHEF, whose gimmick is exactly what you think it is. He’s never won a match. A comic character, his signature move sees him rotate his opponent in the air and yell “MICROWAVE!” before slamming them to the ground. But underneath these comedic moves in the ring, his unrequited need to win gives the character a desperate drive. POWERCHEF, like every wrestler in BOOM’s roster, has wants and needs driven by the match, and his story happens both in and outside the ring.
Wrestling tells its story in a unique way. Fighters can’t give monologues during suplexes. The only dialogue is through pre-match trash talk, interviews, and other extra-ring devices. It's a unique combination of two narratives: the fighting that takes place in the ring and the story that happens outside of it. The only art form I can compare it to is musical theater. There’s a quote attributed to many directors that says, in musicals, “when the emotion becomes too strong for speech, you sing; when it becomes too strong for song, you dance.” Wrestling is like that except, instead of dancing, you hit a guy with a steel chair.
Because of the speed at which characters must be introduced and start doing their stuff — a typical match runs about 10 minutes — wrestlers are often sorted into two categories. The “face” is the good guy, the champion of the people. The “heel” is the villain of the ring who fights dirty and bullies the fans. These boolean bins are simple but effective and, perhaps more importantly, efficient. There can be different variations of each archetype — a monstrous heel will play very differently from an egotistical one — but the set tropes help the audience figure out who to cheer and jeer for.
Pro wrestling is not about reinventing character archetypes — it’s about telling unique stories with the wrestlers, archetypes and gimmicks you have. You fall in love with it because it's the marriage of flying momentum and cathartic narrative. That’s certainly how Mitchell, a UBC finance alumnus and the owner and creator of BOOM!, found his love of the craft.
Originally, he wasn’t interested in the big show offered by WWE — he found the whole thing corporate and boring, without enough ring time to show off the players’ talents. But when he got into New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) and Mexican wrestling in 2015,his interest was piqued — the storytelling was just better, elevated beyond what the WWE had made him think possible. “I remember a guy delivered a flying headbutt, and I was like: this is the greatest thing I have ever seen. And from that moment on, I became evangelical about pro wrestling.”
He wanted to pass on that fanaticism to others with BOOM! A comedy producer by trade who specialized in high-concept shows at the Little Mountain Gallery, he decided in 2022 to host a 64-person wrestling match to determine his first daughter’s middle name. That characteristically absurd origin story led to BOOM! Pro Wrestling as we know it — complete with Time Machines, former president Abraham Lincoln, and in-ring weddings where food complaints prompt the chef to body slam attendees.
BOOM! is a perfect storm of science fiction, devastating romance and human violence. But Mitchell can only control what happens before the bell rings. Inside the ropes, the wrestlers reign.
BOOM!’s talent are a melting pot of theatre kids, athletes and musicians. Take Cherry Blossom, the most face-y face I’ve ever seen. She walked out with such spirit and energy that she barely had to lift a finger to get every soul in the audience on her side. A smaller wrestler, she uses her status as the underdog to get the audience hyped. “During the matches, they can see the fire in me,” she said. “Or they can see the fighting spirit in me. And that [leads to fans] cheering me on.” The character is based on the underdog getting to kick ass. “‘[She] is just me, but turn it up to 200%. [I’m still] Cherry Blossom.”
Wrestling isn’t all crowd work — it’s an art form where the artists come back even after suffering personal injury. Top Speed Tommy Chan, a tag team wrestler with mathematically precise attacks, suffered a badly broken foot in a match that had him out of the ring for 15 months. But he came back and fought with the type of passion and poise that his background in martial arts gave him. Even though it hurts, for him it's a part of the business. “You just gotta learn to love being hit. And it's really, really fun. And [that’s] what makes it addicting. It's the thrill of it, the adrenaline.”
The medium allows high-flying feats of human skill to be expertly contrasted with capital-A Antics. POWERCHEF stood out to me when I first visited BOOM! His character is inherently comedic, having lost one match when another wrestler jumped on his head and piloted him into ratatouille-style self-directed submission. Wrestling, Mitchell said, is inherently funny. The chef knows how to utilize outlandish setup and slapstick and cook it up with a nice serving on bone-crushing suplexes and dives. He believes what makes wrestling unique is its ability to adapt to absurdity within inherent time constraints “There's all these glass walls that we're allowed to break whenever we want.”
And break them they do. The match I went to on Feb. 27 was the perfect example of why wrestling is so compelling as a medium. The night’s theme was “Work of Art”. It was a masterpiece that lived up to its name. Before the match, Mitchell told me that this was his most self-indulgent card — 14 of his best wrestlers performing at the top of their game. Travis “Wild Eyes” Woloshyn, the MC and arbiter of all BOOM!’s set ups and payoffs, introduced the wrestlers for the evening and declaimed to the acolytes of the ring: “These are the new masters. This is BOOM! Pro Wrestling, and this is a work of art!”
The narrative of the evening was the return of two BOOM! wrestlers who recently made the big time: Travis “The Professional” Williams and Judas Icarus. Travis was the head heel of the evening. He played the pompous ass — the big shot who comes back to his hometown and finds it wanting. On the mic he called the fans posers, the wrestlers cowards and the reigning champion weak.
In contrast, Judas was a demon, a monstrous heel obsessed with only inflicting pain. His tongue flicked out of his mouth like a frog searching for flies. He walked out, flipped a chair, and cried for joy. These heels were a cosmic threat to the kingdom of BOOM!
Not every match of the evening was part of this overarching narrative, but they still had me glued into my chair. One standout fight was a bombastic clash between Ricky “The Example” South and Zaye “PNW Playboy” Perez. Perez was an acrobat who could fly from the top ropes and land brutal throat kicks. South was a juggernaut, managing to send Perez across the ring with a single hit.
The two slammed each other until they couldn’t anymore. It was myth and parable in action — Perez was the songbird soaring through the air and South was the unkillable grizzly batting at him with his paws. The audience cheered for Perez, so far out of his opponent’s weight class it almost felt unfair they were put in the ring together. Perez ducked deadly blows, and pinned South before flying once more across the ring.
Perez nearly had him. But wrestling can’t always be the hero’s journey we hope for: sometimes the bear kills the songbird.
Judas Icarus’ storyline continued through the night. He bet Wild Eyes if he beat his scheduled opponent Amira, the announcer would get flipped — thrown to the mat and tossed like a pancake. Wild Eyes cried that he was just a normal man, not one of the superheroes fighting that night; to be flipped would mean his death.
This prelude gave the match stakes and weight. The audience shifted forward — we were no longer simply watching two athletes clash — our announcer’s health was hanging in the balance.
Judas, true to his mic talk, fought like an animal. He threw Amira like a sandbag. Amira, to note, was one of the best wrestlers I have ever seen. She was a champion, using the ropes to jump at Judas with arms forward in Superman-style flight and commanding the audience’s attention like a conductor. She would clap once, and the floors would rumble with our collective excitement.
Near the end of the fight, Judas broke a rule and was about to be thrown out by a referee — but Amira wouldn't let him leave that easily. They continued to clash until the mat was scarred. After a battle fought so hard both fighters were bruised and bleeding, Amira managed to pin Judas. People stood up from their chairs and shouted in relief and joy. I smiled from ear to ear as the tables turned and Wild Eyes gleefully flipped Judas Icarus.
At the end of the night, after miniature stories of epic proportions, the main event’s bell rang. Casey Ferreira, the reigning Vancouver champ, had to defend his title from Travis Williams, the boisterous big-time brat.
Williams fought dirty — he bent Ferreira’s leg until I could almost hear the ligaments pop. He went for that leg for the rest of the match. Each time he kicked it, the audience let out a choked gasp. In terms of the narrative, it was a clever set-up for a weak point — a Chekhov’s gun that we hoped wouldn’t be fired.
Judas Icarus, from outside the ring, tried to knock Ferreira down, circling like a rottweiler about to be let loose on unsuspecting prey. The heels fought dirty and Ferreira, the honourable champion of Van City, was taking a beating. He would pin Williams only for him to bolt upright and send Ferreira flying. You could see the yellow preludes of bruises raise painful heads on Ferreira’s chest. Remember: this is real.
The ref, the only sign of order when the starting bell rings, was knocked out by a stray fist from the fray. This was all it took for Judas Icarus to jump in the ring and start wailing on Ferreira alongside Williams. People shouted. My breath caught in my throat. Wild Eyes tried to step in, but he was just a regular man — he was pummelled to the ground, the champion lying nearly bleeding beside him.
You have never heard a crowd pop like when Amira flew into the ring. Each person became a crackle of noise. Wild Eyes and Amira pushed down and flipped Judas Icarus, giving Ferreira enough time to put Williams in a surgically precise chokehold. Williams had to tap out.
The walls shook. It was like a church in the rapture.
Wrestling is storytelling. There’s a three act structure, extra-narrative entanglements and enough Chekhov's guns to fill an armoury. The audience at BOOM! doesn’t come out to see an exhibition of flips and pain, but to see fights with meaning — stories.
Wrestling is exciting because it’s intense, romantic, mythical storytelling that can hold a steel chair. In the age of artificial intelligence where art is becoming a coding problem, wrestling is so entirely human. Like Mitchell said: THIS IS REAL!
