Lifelong Canucks fan calls headlining AEW show at Rogers “surreal”

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Being front and centre at Rogers Arena on a Saturday night in the middle of the NHL playoffs resonates with Kyle O’Reilly.

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It’s a travel day for the Vancouver Canucks and Edmonton Oilers in their second round series, and All Elite Wrestling is putting on show at the downtown rink in their place. 

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O’Reilly (real name: Kyle Greenwood) is in the main event, facing off with Adam Copeland for the TNT championship. O’Reilly is a 37-year-old from North Delta and lists himself as a lifelong Canucks fan.

O’Reilly’s been a pro wrestler since 2005. He’s been in rings all over the world. Saturday will mark his first appearance at Rogers Arena.

He’s been caught up in these playoffs. He also talks about recently rewatching June 17, 1994, the ESPN 30-for-30 documentary about O.J. Simpson’s run for the police and all the sporting events that happened that day, including the New York Rangers’ Stanley Cup victory celebration after defeating the Canucks.

“I have such vivid memories of that series,” O’Reilly said in a phone interview last week. “Trevor Linden, Pavel Bure, all those guys.

“Saturday night will be super special. Being backstage, and seeing the Canucks logos on the walls, will be a surreal moment. That’s one of the cool things about wrestling for this company, because we do go into a lot of NHL arenas. It’s something to see that side of the curtain and feel the whole atmosphere.

“If you had told me that I would be coming back to my hometown and wrestling at Rogers Arena when I started this, I would have never believed you. It’s pretty special.”

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This is AEW’s first trip to Rogers Arena as well. The five-year-old company is trying to give wrestlers and wrestling fans a viable option to World Wrestling Entertainment. O’Reilly wrestled under the WWE banner from 2017-21.

If he was an NHLer, he would be a candidate for the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy, which salutes perseverance and dedication. 

He had neck fusion surgery in September 2022. He believes his injuries were cumulative; he graduated from North Delta Secondary in 2005, and he went straight into the House of Pain wrestling school — run by local promotion Elite Canadian Championship Wrestling (ECCW) — and has been making his living in the squared circle ever since. 

He suffered a rare post-surgical nerve condition called C-5 Palsy, which left him without use of his right arm for eight months. He rehabbed, and he returned to the ring two months ago. 

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“I had such a solid support system at home. My wife (Erica) was so positive. She wouldn’t let me get down,” said O’Reilly. “My daughter (Janie) was six months old when I got hurt. I got to spend 18 months at home with my brand new daughter. Otherwise, I would have been travelling on the road at that time. I got a chance to bond with my daughter. It was really precious time spent at home. I look at it as a weird positive.”

O’Reilly is also a Type 1 diabetic. He was diagnosed just when he was starting to train for wrestling and says he was so determined to get into the business that finding out he was a diabetic never gave him any pause. Young children get diagnosed and manage along just fine, he says, and that prompted O’Reilly to believe “I can roll with this.” He thinks, in fact, that it made him “more accountable,” for his health.

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“Every day is different with diabetes,” he said. “It’s a constant, 24-hour thing. The only time I really feel like I get a break from it is when I’m in that ring. Those 20 to 30 minutes in the squared circle are when I can shut it off.

“I had been shy about it. In the last few years, people have reached out and said that they had gotten something out of watching me because they’re Type 1. That’s made me look at it in a different light and think maybe I can help inspire people. I’ve been talking to kids camps and things like that. I want people to know there’s no limit to what you can do when you have diabetes.”

As well as a hockey fan, O’Reilly was a wrestling fan growing up. He was 11 when he saw his first-ever live show and it was at Rogers Arena. It was a WWE pay-per-view entitled Rock Bottom: In Your House, and it’s so ingrained in O’Reilly that he offers up its Dec. 13, 1998 date instantly when he talks about it. 

After House of Pain, O’Reilly worked where ever he could. He remembers wrestling for three people in a “small, little armoury in a little town in Illinois.” He worked a kid’s birthday party one day in Burnaby; they set up the ring in the backyard and used the tool shed as both their dressing room and their entrance way.

“We went out and wrestled and the kids probably could not have care less,” O’Reilly said. “It’s one of those funny experiences you have along the way.”

@SteveEwen

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