Like many, Mattias Clement’s love for wrestling started as a six-year-old plopped in front of the TV on Saturday mornings.
The dream of becoming a professional wrestler is something that had a lot of people telling his parents “he’ll grow out of it.”
“I heard that a lot. ‘He’ll grow out of it, he’ll grow out of it,’” said Clement, a.k.a WWE’s Tyler Breeze. “As I went through school I even had teachers go out of their way to say ‘hey it’s a one in a million shot.’ This is the big time, the odds of making it are extremely slim and the odds of not making it are extremely large. Nothing is guaranteed, you’re basically jumping and taking a risk.”
Clement and his friends would wrestle, like many kids, in the basement, until his dad put an end to that.
“Once my dad found out we destroyed the drywall in the house he said ‘no more wrestling,’ so that forced us to build a ring in the backyard and just kind of start there,” Clement said.
The ring, made of plywood 2x4s and tires in the backyard of his Penticton home, was his very first training ground.
“It was actually not too bad to take your first bumps in. It was interesting,” Clement said.
Determined that becoming a professional wrestler was what he was going to do, Clement had to deal with a fair bit of nay-saying.
“A lot of the time people were saying ‘you’re crazy, this is never going to happen, what’s your back-up plan?’” Clement said. “It’s something Jim Carrey said that solidified it in my head. ‘It’s possible to fail at something that you don’t want to do.’ So if wrestling is what I want to do, why can’t I do it? Who’s to say I can’t do it?”
He was initially planning to go to a developmental branch of the WWE in Kentucky, however Lance Storm’s Storm Wrestling Academy had just opened up in Calgary at the perfect time.
“For me it was really worth it, it didn’t seem like a risk. It was the only thing that I was going to do. No matter what I had to do to get there, I was going to do that,” Clement said.
Clement’s character, Tyler Breeze, is a narcissistic pretty boy, who has a penchant for taking selfies during matches.
Breeze was called up from the WWE developmental branch, NXT, in October after travelling around North America with the NXT main roster for nearly two years, something that made the transition easier, he said.
“There was already a lot of my friends up in the locker room, so it was kind of an easy transition. It was just a matter of whether or not I had to go to NXT anymore,” Clement said. “I was ready for it.”
Asked to describe his character in one sentence, Clement said Breeze is “the most good looking piece of gorgeousness that you’re ever going to meet.”
Clement has been polishing the character over time.
“As you kind of create something, it’s almost a rough draft. As you start to work with all these great people, all these great minds that have opinions that can help further your career you just take a little bit from here, a little bit from there, maybe you lose something that wasn’t working,” Clement said. “You take a collaboration of a lot of different opinions and views on things and create something that works.”
He used to attend shows in Kelowna growing up, but after they stopped coming to the venue, he never expected to be performing in his home town.
“Now I was looking at the schedule and I saw we were coming to Penticton,” Clement said. “It’s funny I think this is our debut show, WWE has never run in Penticton, so to actually be a part of that is really cool.”
“Basically everyone I know that’s still in Penticton is going to be at the show, so it should be a good turnout,” Clement said. “It is really a dream come true.”
Breeze will join Dean Ambrose, Bray Wyatt, Demon Kane and more as they get set to throw down at the South Okanagan Events Centre on Feb. 6 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $20 and are available at the Valley First Box Office at the SOEC, online at www.valleyfirsttix.com and by phone at 1-877-SOECTIX.
