Get ready to rumble, Flin Flon.
Northern Empire Wrestling will bring their “Stomping Grounds” tour to Gunner’s Furniture and More June 7. First bell is at 7 p.m. The tour stop is part of a ten-show stretch for Northern Empire Wrestling. They started in Cormorant on May 31 and will finish on June 9.
“You can expect three hours of family-friendly entertainment, with a lot of good up and comers, some high-flying action, hardcore stuff, comedy – there’s something for every kind of wrestler that they enjoy, whether it’s old-school style wrestling, or today’s high flying acrobatics stuff,” said promoter Marc Merric.
Besides organizing the event, Merric will be half of the main event, facing off against a former tag-team partner Shadow Xtreme. He’s been wrestling since 2005 and said the freedom of wrestling is a big appeal to him.
“The pay is great for the most part and then the travel,” Merric said.
“I can go to Mexico for a week and somebody’s flown me there and all I gotta do is wrestle for 15 minutes and then I can stay at a resort and enjoy myself.”
Wrestling has taken Merric around the world and has granted him an opportunity to meet some of his idols.
“I’ll get to go and experience fights and travel with people,” he said. “Wanting to work with people I idolized as a kid was probably the biggest thing, but I mean, sometimes I’ve worked with my idols. That is I would rather not because now I see them in a different light.”
Northern Empire is fully First Nations owned and travels around northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan hitting towns a few times a year.
“You only have so much rotation in your crew, then you only have so much rotation at the merchandise stand,” Merric said. “So if they’ve already seen it, already bought it, already watched it, there’s no reason for them to come back again until the following year where you’ve got new guys and new stories and new merchandise. It’s like going to the fair. You can only go to the fair so many times before you’ve gone on the Tilt-a-Whirl 20 times.”
Merric said he has wrestled Shadow Xtreme before and is ready for anything.
“Well, this will probably be the 20th time I’ve been on the road with Shadow and we always have a good solid fight between us,” he said. “I think we’re probably five and five for matches right now, so this one will be a serious tiebreaker.”
Merric said he put Shadow Xtreme down with a “Canadian Destroyer” wrestling finisher in the past, but might be breaking out a new move to try and take Xtreme by surprise. Merric said the key to wrestling Shadow is to wait for him to make a mistake.
“He can work at such a speed that you can just wait around for him to get tired,” Merric said.
“He doesn’t have the cardio that he should for a high flyer and really, I just wait for him to make a mistake and take advantage of it.”
Tickets are available at Gunner’s Furniture and More.
