Social worker to professional wrestler: A hardcore Montreal day-to-night transition

'The greatest emotional release in my life!' Montreal wrestler Katrina Creed does social work in the day before stepping into the ring at night.

The high-flying, body-slamming, clotheslining independent wrestlers in Montreal have some of the most intense day jobs to night passions around.

“There’s something really weird about being able to do shows on weekends, having this, like, high adrenaline events, and having, honestly, the time of your life, and then having to kind of switch gears and try to steer a day job,” said social worker Namita, who goes by Katrina Creed in the ring.

“Honestly, it’s bizarre.”

Creed is a grant writer at Face a Face, an intervention centre that helps vulnerable people find homes. She has been with the non-profit organization for five years.

She has also wrestled regularly in Montreal, in addition to stops in Europe, the nine other Canadian provinces and will soon head to Japan. She’s held the International Wrestling Syndicate (IWS) belt, the Acclaim women’s belt, in addition to other titles.

She said her job and passion require very different energies that can be exhausting.

“There’s that duality and that difference in energy, and when I’m on stage,” she said.

“Just that adrenaline and the aggressiveness that comes out is just so contrarian to how I am backstage, and then that kind of acts as like a juxtaposition over my day job, which is, like, completely the opposite, where I kind of try to tap into my more nurturing side, my more caring side, and just try to be compassionate as much as possible with people.

“So there’s definitely more of a vulnerability and a softness that’s there in my day job that’s not always present in wrestling, especially when I’m on stage, or at least not always in the same way.”

Andrew Stott, or Professor Shayne Hawke, is the IWS co-director and was one of Creed’s trainers. He’s also trained a number of bartenders, truck drivers, gym teachers and mechanics who choose to enter the ring and start slamming.

“We’ve had a lot of interesting day jobs over the year,” said Stott.

“I think we’re just like everybody else, so sometimes people will say, ‘How can you be cheered or booed by, you know, hundreds of fans, and then go to work on Monday?’ And it’s because it’s really not that big of a deal. It’s work, right? It’s the same thing that we do everywhere else.”

Stott explained that the “kayfabe” illusion — where staged elements are portrayed as authentic — has been broken for a long time.

“I think that people like to see flawed characters and flawed humans,” he said. “So, to act like we’re above other people is a complete mistake.”

For someone like comic book artist Andy Belanger, writing stories in the ring as “The Animal” and on the page for Lethal Comics are similar.

“The bleed through is pretty similar because I’m a storyteller in both professions,” he said.

Physically, however, getting slammed through a table on Friday is something he feels at the office.

“Wrestling feels like getting in a car crash every time,” he said. “Especially at 47.”

“It’s just going back and forth between two different worlds that require so much of you, and for a while, and even now, it’s kind of all I do, so there isn’t really that sort of relaxation or that balance that I probably need to find somewhere still figuring that part out,” said Creed.

Akira Buhaina is the head intervention worker at Face a Face and has worked with Creed for years. She said that, as much as wrestling requires recovery time, social work also requires an outlet.

“It’s extremely important to have some sort of outlet, especially when you’re dealing with a lot of pressures and you’re dealing with people that are kind of affected by a lot of systemic issues going on,” she said.

“So it’s important to have, especially a frontline worker, to have something to help you kind of alleviate the stress because if you don’t, you can lose your mind.”

Belanger and over a dozen other wrestlers crossed the ropes and entered the ring for the “Season’s Beatings” event at the MTelus theatre in Montreal on Saturday night.

Creed knows the feeling well and says there is nothing like it.

“It is the greatest emotional release in my life,” said Creed. “I’m so fortunate and grateful to have found something that, honestly, I feel like, just lights my life ablaze in the best of ways. And I just love it. I need it, I think, more than it needs me.”