Magazine writing — What's new

I’ve always enjoyed professional wrestling (to my mother’s ongoing bafflement) and I like writing about it. I’m a casual fan. Every so often I’ll get together with friends to watch a big event, and a few times a year I’ll head out to the Halifax Forum, the Spryfield Lions rink or the Alderney Landing theatre to watch a show live. It’s fun to see the big names when they come to town — I don’t think I’ll ever forget the heavy, brooding, magnetic presence of Roman Reigns in the ring — but I particularly enjoy going to the local shows, where most of the performers have day jobs and wrestling is a true passion.

Maddison Miles has been a mainstay at those local shows for years. I was about to say decades, but Miles is only 19. She started coming to wrestling as a child, decked out in a cape, and eventually stepped into the ring herself. After five years on the local circuit, she’s gone to England to pursue her dreams there.

I wrote about Miles for the November issue of Halifax Magazine. It’s one of my favourite pieces from the past year, and one of the magazine’s most-read 2019 stories.

Wrestling is fake, of course, in the sense that the outcomes of matches are pre-determined. But there is nothing fake about Maddison Miles leaping off the top rope and landing on several opponents outside the ring. Or a wrestler hoisting an opponent over her head before slamming him to the mat — usually a piece of plywood with a pretty paltry amount of cushioning over it.

Because wrestling is “fake” wrestling fans have a reputation for being suckers, or just not too bright. But that’s a gross misunderstanding. The outcome of Avengers movies is pre-determined too, but the millions of people who enjoy them are not idiots. Fans know what they like — to cheer the good guys, boo the bad guys, and enjoy the theatrics and athleticism. In wrestling parlance, Miles sells. She makes it look real. That’s her selling in the photo at the top of this post. A couple of summers ago I saw local wrestler Markus Burke pick a pre-teen out of the audience and use him as a battering ram to hit former WWE star Jack Swagger in the gut. Swagger staggered around. “He really sold for the kid,’” a friend said after the match. (The kid had a huge grin on his face after Burke dropped him by his seat again.)

I’ve written about wrestling before. My 2016 Walrus piece on local wrestler Troy Merrick, aka The American Patriot, was a National Magazine Award finalist. And I wrote about how wrestlers can touch us after the death of Chris Pallies, aka King Kong Bundy.

Bundy had a brief period in the spotlight during the 1980s, as a bad guy (heel, in wrestling parlance) feuding with the then stratospherically popular Hulk Hogan. Obituaries variously describe him as being 61 or 63 years old when he died.
My reaction to Bundy’s death got me thinking about the emotional connections people feel to professional wrestlers. Three years ago, I was researching a radio documentary and magazine feature on professional wrestling. Whenever I mentioned these projects in conversation, I was struck by how many people would fondly recall watching wrestling as children — either live or on TV — and how often they had one particular wrestler they were taken with: Leo Burke, the Cuban Assassin, the Ultimate Warrior. Stewart Young, my producer at CBC Radio, told me the most intensity he had ever felt at Maple Leaf Gardens came not during a Leafs game, but when he went to a wrestling show and watched Hulk Hogan work the crowd like a master.

What strikes me about the wrestlers and fans I’ve interviewed is their level of knowledge, dedication and commitment. Fans will travel across the province for a show. Wrestlers will study the psychology of crowds to learn how to work them. When I was interviewing Miles for Halifax Magazine, I mentioned a moment in one of her matches and told her it seemed very emotional. She didn’t say anything. Then I thought right, she knows how to sell. “Or maybe it just seemed that way because you’re good at getting us to feel what you want us to,” I said. When I was interviewing Markus Burke, we got to talking about Jake “The Snake” Roberts, and he said, “Jake Roberts: his mind was the best part of his wrestling. He just knew how to tell a story. You thought it was real whatever he did.”

One of the great things about the local scene is the proximity between wrestlers and fans. The performers are at their own merch tables at intermission and after the show. They smile and take pictures with kids. They don’t feel like they have to stay in character once the show is over. Here is Miles, smiling as the crowd cheers, moments away from taking the mike to thank them for all their support.

That’s my neighbour Tobias Beale in the photo. He’s a long-time musician and music teacher who has shared his enthusiasm for music with students in Halifax for decades. He also brought regular live music gigs back to St. Margaret’s Bay, where we both live, by purchasing an old church hall and holding concerts there, featuring an amazing array of musicians, from community bands to people who regularly play much, much larger venues.

And now he’s about to retire.

I love this picture. Riding off into the sunset and all that.

A few months ago, Ken Partridge, the editor of Our Children magazine, asked me to write a story about long-time teachers retiring at the end of the year. When you’ve spent years around kids all day long, how do you prepare for that to end? It seemed like an interesting question and I jumped on the assignment.

This is one of those stories that really depends on the people you find to interview, and I lucked out. I was still looking for sources back in late March, when I went to Toronto for a weekend to speak at the annual jack.org summit. On the flight home, I heard a woman in the row behind me talking about how she was retiring at the end of the year, and I turned around and introduced myself. Her name was Theresa George, and she started her career teaching in the Poplar River First Nation, then came back to Nova Scotia, where she has taught at the same school for 31 years. We had a fantastic chat (later, on the phone — not on the plane). I also talked to a school counsellor who says the big problems in schools are the big problems in society: income inequality, unequal access to services, and so on. And I got some interesting perspective from a teacher who absolutely loved her job, retired a year ago, but now says she would never, ever go back.

I liked the way this story turned out. You can read it here.

By the way, Tobias is a very interesting character; I made a radio documentary/podcast about him for CBC that you can listen to here. It follows him as he works with students in the school system and sets up his own jazz band at Paul’s Hall for those who want to play more. One of the graduates of the program is Leith Fleming-Smith, who plays with Matt Mays and was Music Nova Scotia’s Musician of the Year in 2018.