Oliver Lee Bateman wrote an article for MEL MAGAZINE about one of Ring Of Honor‘s newest talents in PCO before “The French-Canadian Frankenstein” signed with the company. The article has some interesting quotes from the 50-year old renaissance man about his reemergence into wrestling, how he wasn’t too aware of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before feeling the electricity of his new gimmick and the major influence his manager Destro has had on him. Quotes from the piece are below:
PCO on his 2018:
“2018 has been my best year ever, because I’ve brought myself back to life as Frankenstein,” says the hulking, now 50-year-old mohawked grappler. “I began changing everything about myself at 35, and now I’ve got the gimmick I was meant to have. And thanks to my conditioning, I will feel like I’m 35 forever. I’m telling you the truth when I say I once had no idea who or what Frankenstein was before I took on this gimmick, but now I embody Frankenstein. I have found the perfect wrestling gimmick for me, and there’s no going back. This is a story of transformation.”
On Destro’s influence:
“Destro was a man who was living in the same neighborhood that I was,” is all PCO says when I ask about the origins of the slender, trenchcoat-wearing svengali in his videos, noting that he isn’t someone I was familiar with during my career as a fitness writer. “I’d heard from friends that this was a man who had lost 150 or 200 pounds, and that he knew everything there was to know about diet, nutrition, as well as the old ways of training — the strongman training. I knew I had to seek this man out and learn from him.”
“Destro taught me how to eat, which is eating thousands of calories not of animal flesh, but of animals products — the eggs and milk, not the meat. Why not eat the renewable parts of the animals, the things meant for the young that keep you young? And Destro would have me doing thousands of isometric holds, air squats, the shock treatments. All of this has increased my endurance, which is what truly matters at my age.”
Yet Destro, who shrieks into the camera and drools some kind of black liquid when he talks, strikes me as more of a madman than a mad scientist (or accredited trainer). “That madness is all part of it,” PCO says. “He’s my manager in character, when I’m the monster and he controls me. And he’s my manager in real life, when he supervises my diet throughout the day. I call him several times per day, asking about when I should eat sugars and when I should eat fats. He does the same with my unique PCO workouts, making sure it’s constant variation, never the same thing, all of these old, forgotten methods. I tape a lot of the workouts,make videos of them, because this type of training was a way of promoting wrestlers in the old days. A strongman would come out and bend steel and the crowd would be impressed, because this type of thing they understand better than lifting a barbell with some weights on it. And for me, I’m doing the lifts you see on the video, not lifting these gimmick fake weights. So if I struggle with a rep or don’t get it… well, at least you can watch that and see my struggle.”
On being introduced to Frankenstein:
“I’d never seen the movie or read the book,” PCO says of the gimmick he adopted in 2016 and used thereafter in bloody brawls with indie stars such as Austria’s Walter. “I’d never had my own gimmick, either. I was either myself, Pierre Carl, or they said, ‘Dress up and wrestle as a pirate.’ That’s why, right now, I’m in the best place I’ve ever been in — professionally and physically. I have this gimmick that’s an extension of me, a gimmick that was just waiting for me to take it on.”
You can read the entire article by going here.
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