Pride & Passion
- John Edwards
- Mar 19
- 8 min read
Editor’s Note: I have been a promoter with Rock Solid Wrestling and have known Jake O’Reilly for almost 20 years. I met him at one of his early matches in Collingwood, Ontario, about 90 minutes north of Toronto. He’s a colleague and friend.
Which makes me the perfect person to tell his story.
Thanks for reading…
“Irish” Jake O’Reilly is lucky to be alive.
On March 11, 2011, the Ontario professional wrestler was on a tour for All Japan Pro Wrestling alongside his friend and current NXT North American Champion Shawn Spears.
The pair were on the bus with the Japanese wrestlers, includingHawaiian Taiyo Kea, Minoru Suzuki, and Kaz Hayashi, as the promotion wanted the young Canadians to get acclimated to the culture.
On their way to a show in Sendai, the country was rocked as a massive 9.1-magnitude earthquake hit the northeast coast of Honshu on the Japan trench.
Thirty minutes later, the earthquake forced a Tsunami with waves measuring more than 130 feet. In the end, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed upward of 20,000 people, injuring thousands more.
O’Reilly recalled a smaller earthquake a short time before and he and Spears were worried.
“We’ve never experienced an earthquake, we’re two guys from Ontario,” he said.
“The Japanese guys were laughing at us, it was a tiny one and it happens all the time there.”
However, when the next earthquake hit, the mood on the bus changed quickly.
“When the bus pulled over and we’re on the highway and the big one hit … Spears and I were making faces and giggling, it’s another earthquake, no big deal,” he said.
“We looked around, and the Japanese wrestlers were not joking. It’s a bad sign when Minoru Suzuki has a bad look on his face because that dude is universally recognized as one of the toughest men of all time. Our silliness turned to dread, really quick.”
On television, the news was showing a map of Japan with a flashing “red zone.”
“I said ‘Suzuki-san, where are we on this map?’ He said, ‘red zone.’”
They spent the next 36 hours on the bus.
It’s one of the many unique experiences O’Reilly has had in his more than 20 years as a professional wrestler.
A long way from the small rural Ontario village of Baxter, about an hour from Toronto, where he was raised.
It was here O’Reilly got his first glimpse.
“As soon as I saw it on television, I was enamoured by it,” he recalled. “I saw Hacksaw Jim Duggan, he was the first guy that ever captured my imagination.”
While he couldn’t watch it every week, once local TV station CKVR started broadcasting Monday Night Raw, he was hooked.
“When I got to watch it every Monday, I just became obsessed.”
From then on, his goal was to become a professional wrestler and like many in the industry, he started as an amateur.
“I became an amateur wrestler because I thought it would help me become a professional,” O’Reilly recalled.
Somewhat oblivious to the difference between amateur and professional wrestling, his coach was less than amused when he asked when they would be learning moves like the figure-four leg lock.
“I remember asking my amateur coach. His name was Todd Clarke, he was OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) officer that volunteered but he was an Olympic alternate. A tough guy. A really tough guy. I asked him when we got to learn the submission holds. Because I wanted to do the sharpshooter and stuff.”
When he turned 18, O’Reilly enrolled at the Wrestleplex in Cambridge, a city in Western Ontario, about three hours from Detroit.
The school was operated by an up-and-coming wrestler, Eric Young, who would go on to a lengthy career with TNA Wrestling, winning the world heavyweight championship.
“I didn’t find it tough at all, I loved every second of it,” he said of his training. “It was way more painful than I could ever imagine. I remember EY (Eric Young) saying the first thing you’re going to notice is after learning to bump, you’re going to have pain in your throat. I go, ‘why the throat?’ He said because you’re going to be clinching your neck so tight, you’re worried about hitting your head, it’s going to make the muscles in the front of your throat, tight. And he was 100 per cent right about that.”
After about six months of training, O’Reilly started to navigate the Ontario independent wrestling scene.
One of his early matches was a full-circle moment when he wrestled Duggan, at what’s become a staple venue of the provincial circuit, the Collingwood Curling Club.
“That’s a perfect spot for a green kid, I get to wrestle a guy I watched on TV,” he said. “He’s a cool guy.”
O’Reilly said he received mentorship from veteran wrestler Tornado, a revered journeyman known for making anyone look good, who had a stint as an enhancement talent for WWE under his real name, Mark Bartolucci, and the Notorious T.I.D, a six-foot, four-inch-tall, 300-pound brute covered in tattoos, from Cambridge, Ontario by way of Las Vegas, Nevada. A physical wrestler who never got his opportunity with one of the bigger promotions but was known for being a skilled big man, T.I.D demands respect for the business.
“I worked T.I.D a lot and kind of earned his respect by taking a good beating and not quitting, the old school way. The way it should be now,” he said. “Closed mouth, open ears.”
O’Reilly said the province produces a lot of good wrestlers, many the larger audience hasn’t heard of.
He cites names like Scotty the Body, Tyler Tirva, Daddy Davis and Asher Benjamin as wrestlers with whom he’s had some of his best matches.
O’Reilly has had competitive matches with Crazzy Steve, a friend from high school, who also learned under Young, and was tag team champion with TNA and has wrestled in Mexico.
“Jake O’Reilly is not only one of my greatest enemies but he is one of my best friends. He brings out the best of me and I like to think I do the same for him, iron sharpens iron,”he said. “There would be no Crazzy Steve without Jake O’Reilly. His importance to me is unbound and (his) importance to professional wrestling in Ontario is something that he should take pride in, and something that others should look to as inspiration.”
O’Reilly said some of his favourite bouts were with J.T. Playa. A charismatic wrestler and longtime promoter, who died last year after a courageous battle with cancer, Playa left behind a wife and three young children. He was 43. The promotion he founded, Neo Pro Wrestling in Niagara Falls, continues on.
It’s unfortunate some of these wrestlers are not more well-known, O’Reilly said, though feels Ontario can compete with anyone when it comes to producing talent.
“It’s always been like that. It’s been like that for 100 years. A lot of it is a problem with work visas, they’re expensive, hard to get,” he said. “You get guys like Eric Young and Cody Deaner, who just say, ‘I’m going to make it happen. The talent here rivals anywhere in the world.’”
O’Reilly primarily wrestles for Rock Solid Wrestling, a company owned by Bartolucci that promotes small communities in northern and southern Ontario, many of which wrestler and promoter Dave “Bearman” McKigney used to operate. McKigney was called the Bearman because he owned a real wrestling bear. In 1988, McKigney was killed in a car crash in Newfoundland and Labrador, along with famed WWF grappler Adrian Adonis, and Canadian tag team competitor Pat Kelly.
The current Canadian Heavyweight champion, O'Reilly also had a lengthy career as a tag team wrestler with Anthony Darko, together known as the Pissbeaters.
Darko, a shredded 6-foot, 200 pounder, known for his agility, has earned a reputation as a steady hand.
“You can put Darko in the ring with anybody and it’s going to be a five-star match,” O’Reilly said. “I’ve watched him work people who are barely trained, he’s the best at that.
“We were serious for years and years. To this day, we could have a tag match, and we know what the other guy is going to do, we know what the other guy is going to be. It’s like hockey players, like Malkin and Crosby, they know where the other guy is going to be on the ice.”
“Jake O’Reilly is one of my favourite opponents I’ve ever been in the ring with,” Deaner said. “The goal of every wrestler is to make people believe. Bring a sense of reality to a world that many people think is phoney. Jake O’Reilly is so good, so talented, and so realistic with what he does, he once beat me up so bad after a match that after the event the cops showed up. Three different sets of fans called the police to report that Jake O’Reilly got out of hand at a wrestling show and was assaulting Cody Deaner for real. You don’t get more realistic than that.”
O’Reilly was booked with All Japan Pro Wrestling with help from Canadian promoter and former TNA executive vice-president Scott D’Amore.
He said it was a bittersweet experience.
“I thought I was good, I thought I was mature,” he said. “I thought I was awesome at wrestling. I didn’t know anything. In reality, it was probably on me. I think it could have been a much better experience. I still enjoyed it and it’s cool that I got to do it. My goal was to wrestle in Japan for a living and I achieved that. Albeit for six weeks. It’s a goal achieved, a lot of people don’t get to say that.”
Already homesick and uncertain of how many bookings he’d have after the devastation, once he heard there was nuclear fallout in the rain, he booked a flight home.
O’Reilly
said it’s always been important to him to, first and foremost, pay his bills.
“In wrestling, to really make it, you must throw everything away. I’ll sleep on this guy’s dirty floor and eat tuna. I was never going to do that, I was never that guy.”
O’Reilly said he was “lost and depressed,” when he got home from Japan. It was then his friend turned him onto Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He’s always had an interest in grappling, including catch wrestling, and was able to train with fighters who competed in the Mixed Martial Arts Promotion, Pancrase.
He submitted a fellow student with a leg lock on his first day.
“I just immediately got hooked on it,” he said.
He’s gone on to earn his black belt under his professor, Spencer Lalonde, at Submission Arts Academy, where O’Reilly is also an instructor.
O’Reilly has paid the price for a long career and a physical style, suffering severe knee, back and neck injuries.
“I’m always in pain. I have to sleep on a heating pad most nights and some nights I can’t sleep in the same bed as my wife.”
He said he may not have made the big money, but he had priceless experiences.
In a small town in Tennessee, in front of a sparse crowd of about 30 people, one of the exuberant observers was legendary wrestler Tracy Smothers. Smothers was a classic southern wrestler with excellent fire and a great punch.
Smothers is also revered for his penchant for helping young wrestlers.
“Tracy Smothers in the front row in his tights and his t-shirt,” O’Reilly recalls.
“You guys are the best,” Smothers told O’Reilly and his fellow wrestlers in the tag team match that day, Deaner, Crazzy Steve and Canadian wrestler TJ Harley. “But … one thing you can work on … and that’s how the conversation went for about 45 minutes. But he was right about everything. He went out of his way to help us.”
He also trained in the New Japan Dojo, where at dinner one evening, Antonio Inoki’s daughter taught him how to use chopsticks.
“Drinking Coronas and (eating) Lays chips with hot sauce after learning how to do backflips with the luchadores … When are you going to do that in an office job at the bank?”
Not bad for a kid from Baxter.
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